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A review by bobbo49
Typee by Herman Melville
3.0
Melville's first book, a novel very roughly based on his life and observations when he was on a whaling ship in the South Pacific (which led, of course, to the later masterpiece, Moby Dick). Not nearly as compelling a tale as that brilliant volume, but certainly an interesting introduction to his travels and his worldviews.
The story is told by a young man who runs away from his ship in Polynesia with a shipmate, and wanders into a native village where he is treated as both a guest and a hostage. The book consists mostly of his observations and reflections on the "savages," as he calls them, but he comes to believe that their lives, and the land they inhabit, are in many respects far preferable to those of his home in the developed world: "there were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity . . . to sum it all up in one word: no Money!" He also became very critical of the role and impact of Christian missionaries in these "heathen" lands. All in all, a well-written, if some slow and repetitive, vision of Melville's early interest in the very different peoples and lands of the South Pacific islands.
The story is told by a young man who runs away from his ship in Polynesia with a shipmate, and wanders into a native village where he is treated as both a guest and a hostage. The book consists mostly of his observations and reflections on the "savages," as he calls them, but he comes to believe that their lives, and the land they inhabit, are in many respects far preferable to those of his home in the developed world: "there were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity . . . to sum it all up in one word: no Money!" He also became very critical of the role and impact of Christian missionaries in these "heathen" lands. All in all, a well-written, if some slow and repetitive, vision of Melville's early interest in the very different peoples and lands of the South Pacific islands.