Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860: Volume Nine [Paperback]

The Lighting-Rod Man is one of Melville's lesser known stories. Despite the cold, dark setting, it is more comical than most of his works other works. This satire tells about one door-to-door salesman, and how annoying, pushy, and arrogant he was to his perspective customer (Doesn't seem like a lot has change since then), and how he ends up getting thrown out of the house.
The story The Lighting-Rod Man jumps right into the story in the first paragraph and just goes, which makes it much easier to get into and a much easier read for those that have a hard time getting started reading. I feel that it is worthy buying The Piazza Tales even if you just read this one story let alone the five other stories.

The six stories collected in "The Piazza Tales" range vastly in theme and subject, from the allegorical travelogue of "The Encantadas" to the haunting psychodrama of "Bartleby, the Scrivener." With the exception of the title story (which was original to the collection), they each were published in "Putnam's Magazine," where they were well received and widely read. Although the book (like all of Meville's later work) was a commercial flop, the stories are highly regarded--and rarely read--today.

Opening the volume is "The Piazza," a charming (bordering on precious) pastoral sketch that frames the collection in much the same way that Hawthorne and Irving framed their collections with a stroll around the Manse or a view of Bracebridge Hall. It provides an almost romantic and (for Melville) rare excursion into "fairy-land" in the daylight of the countryside surrounding his home, but at the close of the story the author warns us that "truth comes in darkness."

The best of the five remaining pieces is, surely, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (possibly my favorite story written in English); it is the most Kafkaesque story not written by Kafka. The narrator, a Wall Street lawyer whose office resembles a claustrophobic dungeon, hires Bartleby, a supremely competent copyist who subverts the safe order and hierarchy of the firm when he replies "I would prefer not to" when requested to execute tasks he'd rather not perform. From the first act of rebellion to the end of the story, the atmosphere resembles Poe as much as it anticipates Kafka; its bleak views of the market, of madness, and of municipal estrangement are unsettling.

The other stories vary in quality. The wickedly subversive satire of "Benito Cerenno" is based on a true incident in which a transport of slaves overtook their captors; Melville revises the original narrative to condemn the covert racism of the narrator, a "Massachusetts man" who captains the ship that encounters the mutineers and whose liberal, patronizing opinion of the Africans is so unnuanced that he is unable to recognize that a rebellion has occurred. To modern readers, it all seems ridiculously unbelievable and, while remarkably ahead of its time, Melville's version of the episode sometimes suffers from attitudes and stereotypes which have themselves become unfashionable and uncomfortable.

Interesting and clever, "The Lightning-Rod Man" and "The Bell Tower," are ultimately unmemorable, but the only tale that doesn't work for me at all is "The Encantadas," a series of ten travel sketches based on Melville's trip to the Galapagos Islands. Rather than presenting a literary version of Darwin's earlier travels, Melville emulates Dante, presenting an allegorical vision of purgatory on earth, of "cut-throats" and "tyrants" and "cannibals" amidst the dichotomy of the landscape's unforgiving harshness and overwhelming beauty. Of the pieces in the collection, these ten sketches received the most critical attention during Melville's lifetime, and they are still considered masterpieces by academics. There are inarguably brilliant passages and poetic descriptions, but the allegory seems labored and the "tale" as a whole pales in comparison to either Darwin or Dante.

Put simply, this is the best collection of short stories by any American author.

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