Böcker av Herman Melville

Moby Dick is a literary classic. It charts the adventures of a madman as he pits his wits against a creature, huge and dangerous, set against the haunting background of the sea and its legends and myths. This is not a book about whaling, more a book about humanity, belief and perception, written with skill and humor. The book deserves its position as a classic epic tale. Typee was Herman Melville's first book. He mixes his personal experience of living with the primitive South Sea islanders for four months with further research and his powerful imagination to produce this great work. During his lifetime this book won him great fame, shocking his contemporaries with his descriptions of tribal life. The Readers Encyclopedia described it thus: "A vivid picture of a civilized man in contact with the exotic dream-like life of the tropics." Omoo is the Polynesian word for someone who roams from island to island. The book is once again based on his own experiences, this time he is a crew member whaling in the South Seas. The book gives an account of the life of a sailor in the nineteenth century on the high seas - enlisting the locals, handling deserters and mutiny, visiting beautiful Polynesian islands. A fascinating window through time and space. Redburn is a novel taking us back to Herman Melville's youth - in this book he is a boy on a packet ship sailing between New York and Liverpool. It is a coming of age story, moving from innocence to manhood, encountering bullying, slavery and social privilege. It is punctuated with humor and irony, metaphor and transendence. A semi-autobiographical novel, it helps us understand Herman Melville who lost his father when his was only twelve, his father died penniless after the failure of his business.

Typee (1846) is the first 'romance' of the semi-autobiographical account of life in the Marquesas Islands in the 1840s. A blend of personal experience and the narratives of explorers and missionaries, it influenced many later writers on the Paciflc, including Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. Melville himself deserted from a whaling ship in the islands and lived for four weeks among the inhabitants, observing and recording their way of life. Typee points up the wonders, the dilemmas, the 'fatal impact' of European encounter with the peoples of the Pacific. This edition offers an introduction that considers the book from a post-colonial perspective, and detailed annotation of Melville's allusions.

A sailor narrates the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab's ship and severed his leg at the knee.Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Magnificent and strange, Pierre is a richly allusive novel mirroring both antebellum America and Herman Melville's own life.