I took the break about half way through this story. Then I hit 'The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles' and was bored to tears. I was finding the stories vaguely interesting even if some of them made no sense and I didn't understand them. I started reading this before Christmas and I put it aside for a while as I wanted to complete my Goodreads Challenge and I know I wasn't going to if I kept on trudging through this.
This edition also includes the original source for Benito Cereno. The texts of all the stories are reprinted from the most authoritative recent editions. All show Melville a master of irony, point-of-view, and tone whose fables ripple out in ever-increasing circles of meaning. Several of the tales - Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, The Encantadas and The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" are acknowledged masterpieces. The eight shorter tales included here established Melville, with Hawthorne and Poe, as the greatest American story writer of his age. Outwardly a compelling narrative of events aboard a British man-of-war during the Napoleonic Wars, Billy Budd, Sailor is a nautical recasting of the Fall, a parable of good and evil, a meditation on justice and political governance, and a searching portrait of three extraordinary men. "Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges." So wrote Herman Melville of Billy Budd, Sailor, among the greatest of his works and, in its richness and ambiguity, among the most problematic.
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