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davybaby 's review for:
Billy Budd, Sailor
by Herman Melville
Melville loved his words. I had to look up words that I was pretty sure were made up, like "inly" (inwardly), ones I just didn't know ("quidnuncs", societal gossips), and of course the various sea-faring words.
There were some lovely sections, but much of the time I was just blown away by his love of unwieldy sentences: those with so may commas, dashes and semicolons - as if a punctuation shotgun was aimed at the page and the sentence crafted around its shot - that it becomes difficult to follow his train of thought, or to justify, even by the most verbose and generous critic, the labyrinthine grammar of his prose.
Billy Budd focuses on the tragedy of a young sailor - a beautiful and naive young man - who inexplicably inspires the envy of a ship's officer. This officer unjustly accuses Billy of fomenting mutiny, leading our foolish mariner Adonis to murder him with his bare hands in front of the captain. Despite this, the captain, narrator, and every member of the crew still view Billy as innocent, lamenting his (spoilers) execution for his crime.
Melville presents Budd as an angelic figure, which never quite connected for me. Neither he, the captain, nor the accuser really had much character, which made the book an extended rumination from Melville, with the basic frame of an unfortunate pair of seafaring deaths.
Billy Budd was unfinished at Melville's death and later cobbled together by various scholars, which I'd imagine makes it a bit more fragmented than it would have otherwise been. Even so, I'm not convinced there's enough content to make a novella out of the story. The story itself is about 90 pages, with 126 pages dedicated to various textual and critical notes. The editor's introduction was very dry, but the endnotes gave good context to the book.
Not one I picture going back to, and after also just finishing The Piazza Tales, I don't really see going back to Melville (aside from perhaps Moby Dick again at some point).
There were some lovely sections, but much of the time I was just blown away by his love of unwieldy sentences: those with so may commas, dashes and semicolons - as if a punctuation shotgun was aimed at the page and the sentence crafted around its shot - that it becomes difficult to follow his train of thought, or to justify, even by the most verbose and generous critic, the labyrinthine grammar of his prose.
Billy Budd focuses on the tragedy of a young sailor - a beautiful and naive young man - who inexplicably inspires the envy of a ship's officer. This officer unjustly accuses Billy of fomenting mutiny, leading our foolish mariner Adonis to murder him with his bare hands in front of the captain. Despite this, the captain, narrator, and every member of the crew still view Billy as innocent, lamenting his (spoilers) execution for his crime.
Melville presents Budd as an angelic figure, which never quite connected for me. Neither he, the captain, nor the accuser really had much character, which made the book an extended rumination from Melville, with the basic frame of an unfortunate pair of seafaring deaths.
Billy Budd was unfinished at Melville's death and later cobbled together by various scholars, which I'd imagine makes it a bit more fragmented than it would have otherwise been. Even so, I'm not convinced there's enough content to make a novella out of the story. The story itself is about 90 pages, with 126 pages dedicated to various textual and critical notes. The editor's introduction was very dry, but the endnotes gave good context to the book.
Not one I picture going back to, and after also just finishing The Piazza Tales, I don't really see going back to Melville (aside from perhaps Moby Dick again at some point).