Herman Melville
Paperback | Pages: 271 pages Rating: 3.51 | 828 Users | 65 Reviews
Identify Books Concering Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
| Original Title: | Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas |
| ISBN: | 1495445844 (ISBN13: 9781495445842) |
| Setting: | Tahiti Pacific Ocean |
Chronicle To Books Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
"Omoo is a fascinating book; picaresque, rascally, roving. Melville, as a bit of a beachcomber. The crazy ship Julia sails to Tahiti, and the mutinous crew are put ashore. Put in the Tahitian prison. It is good reading. Perhaps Melville is at his best, his happiest, in Omoo. For once he is really reckless. For once he takes life as it comes. For once he is the gallant rascally epicurean, eating the world like a snipe, dirt and all baked into one bonne bouche. For once he is really careless, roving with that scamp, Doctor Long Ghost. For once he is careless of his actions, careless of his morals, careless of his ideals... That is good about Melville: he never repents. Whatever he did, in Typee or in Doctor Long Ghost's wicked society, he never repented." - D.H. LawrenceMention Based On Books Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
| Title | : | Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas |
| Author | : | Herman Melville |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 271 pages |
| Published | : | February 5th 2014 by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform (first published 1847) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Literature. American. Adventure. 19th Century |
Rating Based On Books Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
Ratings: 3.51 From 828 Users | 65 ReviewsAppraise Based On Books Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
Listened to this from Librivox. It's fun, and I love Melville's voice here. He's got a great wit. This is still not all that recognizable as a novel, with long stretches of description of nature, trees, fruit, shoes, sand, clothing, and all manner of interactions with the indigenous islanders. Very little plot. But it's not fair, really, to hold against it the fact that Melville got so much more complicated, interesting, and brilliant in his work later on.Enjoyable.A breezy, easy summer read, by a young author who has his life and the world before him. Urgency be damned! A meandering, autobiographical account of a stint in the South Seas, that is nevertheless entertaining, convivial, and altogether a different animal than Melville's novels.
This is honestly a pretty well written book, but I think travel literature just isn't for me. Reading this in 20-30 page bursts is fine, but it just did not sustain my interest for anything more than that. If you're really into descriptions of Tahiti circa-1840 this is the novel for you, if not, I recommend reading Melville's other works before this.
Picking up where Typee left off, with the narrator taking leave of the Marquesas and joining the crew of a whaling ship called the Julia, the pseudo-autobiography Omoo continues the adventures of Tomas (although his name is never used in this book) as he seeks a way home. The story told in Omoo is rather less exciting than that in Typee, with nary a life-threatening experience and a general sense of calm unconcern emanating from the narrator. Things happen here, including a mutiny on the Julia,
5.2Herman Melville is by far my favorite author, so it was without hesitation that I picked up the spiritual sequel to his first work, Typee. While Typee has a gripping narrative and is genuinely very interesting in its information, the prose of Omoo feels deliberately alienating in comparison. There is no concrete narrative, and the stories Melville tales are scattered with personal jokes which are incredibly uninteresting to the modern reader. Melville's descriptions are also vastly weaker,
Omoo continues Melville's (semi-autobiographical) adventures from Typee. Having escaped from the cannibals of Typee, he takes part in a whaling boat strike/mutiny, spends time in Tahiti "jail" (not as bad as it sounds), escapes/is released and travels around the Tahitian islands, then joins another whaling ship. Like Typee, Omoo is a mixture of fact and (mostly) fiction. As some critics have noted, Melville "altered facts and dates, elaborated events, assimilated foreign materials, invented
Distant South Pacific adventure sequel to American novelist par excellence Herman Melvilles Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846). Story picks up as the yet unnamed male lead (a quasi-autobiographical Melville) departs life among the natives on the Marquesas Islands aboard a whaling ship bound 1400 miles south by southwest for Tahiti. Text is still very much early, unpolished Melville (then a testosterone-soaked age 28), but as all that slowly washes off the deck one observes the nascent
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