herman

The first major novel by Herman Melville. This is a combination of pamphlet and melodrama, ethnics and esoterics, psychology and memoirs, a detective and travel notes, philosophy and poetry, woven into the historical canvas of the mid-19th century. The main character finds himself in a metaphorical world, reflecting the appearance of the countries of the Old and New Worlds in the mirror of the societies...

Melville has a fairly wide range of styles and approaches. Piazza is a Tolkien excursion into a fairyland, but she asks where the real fairyland is actually located. Piazza, a descriptive and sensitively told pastoral story.

Smooth reading, very pretty, with graceful irony personifying superstition and fears in the unknown. The Apple Tree Table is a cool little ghost story where rationalistic skeptics were right, and it turns out that there is a mundane explanation. And oddly enough for Melville, at the end there is even a message of pro-Christianity.