Friday, May 24, 2013

Typee by Herman Melville


Recently I was becoming an adventure books enthusiast as this was the second book after Solomon’s Mines by Haggard.
Typee is about the writer’s experience with a cannibal tribe in Nukuheva (South Pacific). It is an autobiography with loads of imagination.
He started on a ship and after getting bored (and tormented by captain) left the ship and ran into the jungle with a fellow shipmate named Toby.
The two men walked into the jungle and making way to reach the French army ships. After a run for 3 days they reach to a small colony of Typee (the tribals) hungry and wounded. Both of them stay with them for few months and after that Toby leaves to get the help for him as the wounds were not healing. The writer gives a long narrative on the lifestyle and rituals of the tribe which is neither entertaining nor informative.
The book is ~200 pages and after finishing it there was no real feeling of reading a book. In fact, it was so boring that I wished to leave it and don’t read it further but I did continue and it was very disappointing. Most of the narrative sounds like the imagination of the writer with all the fantasies included in it; from the Royal treatment to hanging out with the tribal beauties at will and even ending with having a sort of Platonic relation with the most beautiful girl on the island (Freud was quite right).
The most irrelevant part and badly written was the narrative around his escape. It was one of the most bizarre escapes that I've ever read or seen in movie.
Apart from it there was never a conclusive reason on why the Typee wanted him stay and serve like a royal (the writer talks about giving some information about the French army which doesn't make sense at all) rather than roasting him and Toby on the very first day of arrival.
Herman Melville’s most famous book is Moby-Dick and I’m so reluctant to read it after reading this one first. Let’s see if some day I can put my hands on this book as well.
My point: go out, pick a hobby or do anything but don’t read. It’s not worth the time.