A review by logickat
Benito Cereno by Herman Melville

2.0

An American ship captain encounters a lame Spanish ship in disrepair. Most of the passengers and crew have been lost to a calamity at sea, leaving only a group of slaves and a handful of crew aboard. In a manner of loquacious verbosity, meandering descriptions consisting of minute details and supportive clauses, not disincluding double negatives, the reader is gradually but eventually brought about to a tale of deception and intrigue. This could have been a very short story, but Melville gets quite wordy, I suppose in an attempt to build suspense. However, the plot twist can be surmised early on, leaving the reader to plod through extraneous narrative, while the protagonist turns a blind and naive eye on the clues given him, be they acute or obtuse. The perspective of the white captains is unsurprisingly one-sided and painfully racist, portraying the whites as victims- conveniently overlooking the fact that the blacks are on the ship because they were forced into slavery by the whites.