A review by greenpete
Typee by Herman Melville

5.0

Until the 1920s, this was Melville's best-known work. In other words, "Moby-Dick" was 80 years ahead of its time. When first published, "Typee" was praised for its realistic portrayal of an indolent life amongst cannibals on a tropical island (Nuku-Hiva in the Marquesas Islands). It was sensational entertainment that satisfied a public hungry for first-person travelogues in exotic locales. They and most literary critics missed the deeper symbolism of Melville's depiction of a Fall from Eden. They were unable to appreciate Melville's irony of so-called paganistic savages behaving more civilized and humane than the white Euro-American society that, with its "Christian" missionaries and insatiable appetite for dominion, ultimately poisoned and destroyed it. But time has a way of balancing the score, and today "Typee," while not as profound as "Moby-Dick," is justifiably ranked with the literary classics. I read this book as entertainment, allegory, and as a layman's wide-eyed anthropological observation. It works on all those levels, and is the next place to go (along with its sequel, "Omoo") after reading "M-D."