Melville'e Selam Olsun

by Jean Giono, Burçak Targaç (Translator)

Herman Melville’in ünlü yapıtı Moby Dick, Fransızcada eksiksiz olarak ilk kez 1941’de yayımlandı. Çeviride üç kişinin imzası vardı: Antikacılıkla uğraşan Joan Smith; İngilizceyi iyi bilmeyen şair, ressam, dansçı Lucien Jacques ve 20. yüzyıl Fransız edebiyatının önde gelen isimlerinden Jean Giono. Kitabın yayıncısı Gaston Gallimard, Giono’dan bir de önsöz istedi: Melville’e Selam Olsun, bu önsözün başlı başına bir kitaba dönüşmüş halidir. Metnin merkezinde Melville ve hayatından bir kesit vardır, ancak Giono onun biyografisiyle bire bir uyumlu bir anlatı kurmaz. Bunun yerine tutkuyla okuduğu Moby Dick’in yazarını ve yazdığı koşulları mekânları ve insanlarıyla yeniden düşünerek canlandırır. Bununla birlikte anlatı yaşantılardan tamamen bağımsız değildir de; hatta belki Melville’den bile çok, Giono’nun yaşantısıyla kesişen yönleri vardır: Melville’in kitaptaki yol arkadaşı Adelina White ile Giono’nun yıllarca birlikte olduğu Blanche Meyer arasındaki paralellikler sonradan keşfedilmiş, araştırmalara konu olmuştur. White - Blanche - Beyaz Balina: peşinden koşulan büyük tutkular. Melville’e Selam Olsun bir metin, iki yazar, iki hayattan doğmuş, gerçekle bağı kendinden menkul bir öyküyü anlatır.

Genres: Fiction, France, 20th Century, Historical Fiction, French Literature, Novels, Books About Books

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Jean Giono, the only son of a cobbler and a laundress, was one of France's greatest writers. His prodigious literary output included stories, essays, poetry, plays, film scripts, translations and over thirty novels, many of which have been translated into English.

Giono was a pacifist, and was twice imprisoned in France at the outset and conclusion of World War II.

He remained tied to Provence and Manosque, the little city where he was born in 1895 and, in 1970, died.

Giono was awarded the Prix Bretano, the Prix de Monaco (for the most outstanding collected work by a French writer), the Légion d'Honneur, and he was a member of the Académie Goncourt.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

”If there’s a consistency in his work, it can only be his distinctive style. His titles are, in reality, nothing but subtitles. The real title of each and every one of his books is Melville, Melville, Melville, again Melville, always Melville. I express myself; I’m incapable of expressing any being other than myself. I’m not obliged to create what other people want me to create. I don’t get caught up in the law of supply and demand. I create what I am. What I am is a poet.”

The French writer Jean Giono, with the help of his friend Lucien Jacques, a close friend, a poet, and a painter, decided that Moby Dick must be translated into French and that they were the duo to do it. From 1936 to 1939, they devoted their lives to the translation, but Giono spent many years before that with a copy of Moby Dick being his constant companion.

”I took it with me regularly on my hikes across the hills. As soon as I entered those vast, wavelike but motionless solitudes, I’d sit down under a pine and lean against its trunk. All I needed was to pull out this book, which was already flapping in the wind, to sense the manifold life of the seas swell up below and all around me. Countless times I’ve felt the rigging hiss over my head, the earth heave under my feet like the deck of a whaler, and the trunk of the pine groan and sway against my back like a mast heavy with wind-filled sails.”

Giono began to write an introduction for Moby Dick, and as happens with writers from time to time, his muse took possession of his pen, and the next thing he knew, his small introduction had grown to the size of a substantial composition. Some would call it a literary essay, but it was certainly much more than that. It was a fanciful mixture of nonfiction, half truths, and outright fabrications. It was an ode from one writer to another.

Melville probably wouldn’t recognize much of himself from this essay, but it reflected the impressions of who the writer of these books must be from a reader’s perspective. It was impossible to separate Melville from his work. Every time I read a book by Melville, I saw him peeking at me from behind a capital M or lingering just behind my flickering eyes in the gutters between lines. I saw his naked footprints impressed in the white borders along the text. He was always there, maybe hoping for some of the praise he rarely received in his lifetime.

As a backdrop for his essay, Giono used a trip Melville took in 1849 to London to sell his latest book White Jacket to a British publisher. While there, he met the fictional Adelina White. ”He sees her eyes. They’re the color of tobacco, with green highlights.” He was struck dumb by her beauty. ”And as she was breathing in, perhaps (he thought wildly) her breast was touching me. He imagined her breast, warm, naked, sensitive, in the shadow of her corset. After that, there was no way in the world he could talk to her.” Wasn’t that just like a writer to imagine, in vivid detail, the pink flesh beneath those voluminous layers of clothes? His flushing face betraying his thoughts. His mind racing away from the images that he had created so that he could attempt to unravel his corkscrewed tongue and try to say something witty that would pull her attention away from his guilty eyes, his glistening forehead, and the blush that was threatening to turn him unnatural colors.

Let’s cock an ear in their direction and see if we can catch some of what they are saying.

”’The sound of those horns and trumpets,’ said Herman, ‘moved me deeply, I don’t know why.’

‘They were playing the opening bars of a Handel concerto.’

‘I’ve never listened to music,’ he said.

‘You have heard,’ she said, ‘the wind and the sea. Anyone who’s listened to the sounds of the elements has listened to music.’”

Clever Adelina. Who wouldn’t be enraptured with such a woman? A woman who had an understanding of a man’s world and saw the beauty nestled in the crevices of the brutality and the raw, muscular toiling. Man against Nature. Man against Man.

This was a strange essay, and there were certainly times when I lost the threads of the fanciful world that Giono was wanding to life. I couldn’t help smiling to myself, thinking of Melville reading this, shaking his head, and secretly wishing he had met this Adelina in London. Melville deserved to be mythologized, made larger than life, as many interesting people and fantastical creatures were in the vast collections of our collective memory. If you are a Melville fan and don’t mind being knocked about a bit as if you were on the deck of a ship weathering a squall, do give this a look through your spyglass. It is the edge of land, and beyond it lies the great expanse of Moby Dick.

May the white whale haunt your dreams, but only close enough to catch you in the glare from its murderous eye and not near enough to risk a flogging by the whip of its vengeful tail.

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[Matthew Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

55th book of 2023. Number #1 in my challenge with Alan: read a book published by NYRB.

A strange little essay/novel/introduction. Giono, though a respected novelist in his own right, was also the one of the two men who translated Moby-Dick into French for the first time, some eighty years after it had appeared in America. He was asked to write an introduction to his translation, and this was the result. As the blurb calls it, 'part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy'. I'm a big fan of Melville and Moby-Dick so I think the history of this book is, in a way, more interesting than the text itself. Giono chooses a strange fragment of Melville's life for the novel, his leaving England and returning to America, just before he would settle down to write his masterpiece. On the way he meets and falls in love with an Irish nationalist. There's your part romance. There are some quotes recorded from the time about Moby-Dick and some are fantastic. My favourite is from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, who ran ten page article on the book in December 1851 which read, 'It is written in letters of blood. . . You can feel the grandeur of the oceans. . . the magnificent savagery of a Macbeth of the seas. . . lifted up by his poetic genius, like the winds of the main.' If that doesn't make me want to reread it, I don't know what will. I think this book works as it was intended, as a short interesting preface to the great American novel, but as a standalone novel, lacking.

[Chris Via]

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bnTA...

[Bob Brinkmeyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

In the “Translator’s Acknowledgements,” Paul Eprile writes that Edmund White (who wrote the introduction to this edition) first urged him to read Giono’s Pour saluer Melville, which White described as “mad, completely mad” (in the best sense of the word, Eprile adds). It’s hard to disagree. Giono initially planned Melville: A Novel as the introduction to the translation of Moby-Dick on which he and two others were working, but clearly things went awry somewhere along the way. What was apparently to be a straightforward personal essay evolved into an imaginative, fantastical meditation on Melville’s life and art, with a few biographical facts sprinkled in here and there. It’s an amazing—mad, maddening, and (at times) breathtaking—work.

While Giono does spend a little time on Melville’s upbringing and early adventures at sea, most of the book focuses on his trip to England in 1849 to present the manuscript of White-Jacket to his British publisher. With some time on his hands, Melville embarks on a trip across the country and along the way encounters Adelina White, a beautiful and mysterious Irish nationalist. (Melville did in fact go to England in 1849, but everything about this cross-country trip Giono completely makes up, including Adelina.) Drawn magnetically together, Melville and Adelina begin opening up to each other, discussing, among many other things, their secret lives and their strivings at meaning and purpose. Before long, amazing things start to happen, particularly when Melville talks about the deep mysteries he finds lurking everywhere in the landscape through which they are passing. We’re suddenly in another world, another realm of consciousness—the multi-layered realm of Melville’s fiction. Two passages (and there are many others) capture Melville’s visionary poetics and their mesmerizing effect upon Adelina:

In the distant, motionless reaches, Herman saw an extraordinary light. It transformed the misty crepe of the far-flung woods into lamb’s fleece. Rust-colored pasturelands covered the earth like wool carpets. So now Herman started to talk about the world that lay before them. He rolled up the sky, from one edge to another, as though it were made of colored silk. And, for a brief moment, there was no more sky. Then, after an interval of our hoofbeats at a gallop, he rolled the sky open again, but now it had turned into a huge skin, tightly enclosing earth’s arteries and veins.

He summoned the birches. And the birches came. She felt them, not just right next to her, as if she was an ordinary field and had leaned against one; she felt them in her heart. He took hold of the tree with the sticky sap, its sound, its smell, its shape, its four leaves, its four seasons, and . . . there was no telling how he did it, but she felt the tree in her heart and, at the same time, she could touch the bark. She’d never had a sensation as pleasurable as that of her empty hand imagining it was touching the birch and sensing, through it, the things he was saying.

It seems clear that in these and other similar passages Giono is probing his own experience in reading Melville. “I’ve often thought,” Melville tells Adelina, in a passage that I think speaks to the bond that Giono as reader feels with Melville the writer: “Someday it could happen, while you’re walking along any kind of a road, that you cross over a mysterious barrier, without suspecting it. It looks to me like this is exactly what you and I have done, at the very same moment. Together we put pressure on a kind of membrane in the air, and it burst as we passed through. Look out! From now on it’s just the two of us, alone, inseparable.” Gorgeous.

In passages like these I’ve cited here, we learn as much about Giono and his poetics as we do about Melville and his; and indeed, Edmund White, in his introduction, goes even further, asserting that Giono’s novel is ultimately Giono’s “poetic self-portrait,” a claim that he grounds by noting a number of parallels between Giono’s and Melville’s lives. I don’t know enough about Giono to weigh in on this, but White is persuasive.

One further aspect of Melville: A Novel needs mentioning: Giono’s author’s preface, in which he briefly discusses his long fascination with Melville. It’s a masterful three pages. For years, as Giono reveals, he carried Moby-Dick whenever he went hiking, reading passages when he rested and then later, when darkness fell and he was returning home, turning inward to the deep connections he felt with Ahab and his otherworldly pursuit of power, knowledge, and the whale. “Then it was as though I’d entered inside his skin, my body clothed in his like an overcoat,” Giono writes of his bonding with Ahab. “With his heart in place of my own, I would troll my wounds through the wake churned by a huge creature of the depths.” Giono goes on to discuss how the most perilous journeys may be entirely internal, entirely within the depths of consciousness, so that behind the gaze of the man or woman walking calmly down the street might be, and often is, a struggle of monstrous proportions about which others will probably never know—unless it ends in some act of destruction.

Let me end with Giono’s exquisite description of Melville’s often baroque prose: “A Melvillian sentence is simultaneously a torrent, a mountain, and a sea, and I would have said, a whale, if Melville himself hadn’t demonstrated, in peremptory fashion, that it’s perfectly possible to comprehend the architectonics of the whale. But like the mountain, the torrent, or the sea, one of his sentences rolls, lifts, and falls in complete mystery. It transports you; it drowns you. It reveals the real of images in the blue-green depths, where the reader moves like a slimy piece of seaweed; or else it encircles you with mirages and echoes off deserted, airless peaks. It presents you with a beauty that resists analysis but strikes you with violence.” I don’t think anyone has put it better.

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adelina And Melville

I read "Melville: A Novel" as a result of my interest in the great American author of "Moby-Dick". I thought it would be valuable to have a perspective on Melville from a writer outside of the United States. The author,Jean Giono (1895 -- 1970) had been unfamiliar to me but was an important French novelist in his own right. He was the first to translate, (with the assistance of others) "Moby-Dick" into French, and his work remains the standard version in French. Giono was asked to write a preface for the original edition of his translation, and the project developed into this short, highly imaginative novel published in the same year,1941, as the translation itself. This English version of "Melville: a Novel" appears in its turn for the first time in a translation by Paul Eprile published by NYRB Classics in 2017 with an introduction by Edmund White.

Giono's novel imagines Melville from the inside in the way that one novelist tries to get inside the mind of another. The book might have been intended as an introduction to "Moby-Dick" for a French reader coming to the work for the first time but it quickly passes beyond that. The story includes some basic biographical information of Melville's life but it is infused with poetry, mysticism and a sense of reflection, both about Melville and about Giono himself. Most of the story takes place in 1849 in London. Melville had crossed the ocean to place his novel "White Jacket" with the British publisher. "White Jacket" was the Melville novel that immediately preceded "Moby-Dick".

The trip to London is, in fact, biographical while Giono's telling includes flights of fancy. Melville is pursued by an angel (with echoes of the Biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel) who tells him that he needs to do the meaningful writing he was born to do rather than write popular sea stories in the manner of his early books. At one point, Melville argues with his angel: "You're saying I should give them the opposite of what they expect? What kind of tune are you whistling now? If you went to the shoemaker's and he handed you a guitar instead of a pair of shoes, what would you say?"

In addition to encountering his angel, Giono creates and has Melville meet a mysterious young woman while taking a carriage ride from London as a cure for restlessness after his business with the publisher is concluded. From the first, Melville is smitten with his fellow-passenger but is reluctant to speak to or approach her. Melville and the young woman gradually talk and establish a bond. They walk together in the fields and hills of rural England where Melville rapturously describes the beauties of nature and his dreams as a writer. The young woman finally reveals her name together with something of her life as a married woman with a four-year old son, and her job smuggling food from England to the starving multitudes in Ireland. The two fall in love, in a relationship that appears unconsummated, and promise to write and hold each other in their hearts as they go their separate ways. With his love for Adelina and under the prodding of his angel, Melville returns to the United States where he will write "Moby-Dick".

The writing in this book and translation is dense and beautiful. It moves from a large, omniscient third person narration to passages in which Melville speaks for himself, particularly when he wrestles with his angel and when he talks with Adelina. Biography (sometimes not entirely accurate) mingles with poetry and with Giono's own philosophical reflection. In his Preface to the book, for example, Giono discusses his translation of :"Moby-Dick" and what Melville came to mean to him. Giono writes of what he learned from Melville:

"Man always craves some monstrous object. And his life has no meaning unless he devotes himself entirely to its pursuit. Often, he needs no fanfare of any kind. He appears to be tucked away, quietly cultivating his garden; but, inwardly, he cast off long ago on the perilous voyage of his dreams. No one knows he's gone. For that matter, he looks like he's still here."

Giono sees Melville as a mystic, dreamer, and visionary as do many, but not all, other readers. What is particularly insightful is Giono's understanding of the importance of the search for love, for a soul mate, both to Melville's writing and to his life.. Giono briefly portrays Melville's marriage to Elizabeth Shaw which was beset with difficulty and which seemed to be lacking in passion. With his invention of Adelina and of Melville's relationship to her, Giono suggests that the search for a true, passionate love was a driving factor in Melville's creative activity and in the search for meaning by many people..

I was glad to get to know something of Jean Giono's work through reading this book. I enjoyed even more reading his poetic, insightful interpretation of an author whose works I have long treasured.

Robin Friedman

[Dax · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finishing Fresan's 'Melvill', I decided time was ripe to finally get to Giono's 'Melville'. Giono, who, along with a friend, was the first to translate 'Moby Dick' into French, takes a playful but philosophical tack to explore what pushes someone to finally find their true calling.

Melville wrote adventure novels before deciding to forego commercial success in pursuit of his masterpiece. In Giono's 'Melville' we find Herman in England after submitting his final adventure novel, White-Jacket, to his English publisher. The Herman that Giono portrays is not historically accurate but perhaps is better suited to illustrate the difficulty in changing your stripes. Herman takes his cue from the fictional Adelina, who found her calling helping those suffering from the Irish potato famine.

If this all sounds strange, that's because it is. It's a strange little novel. But its charm and dream-like qualities, and Giono's gorgeous writing... I'm thankful that Archipelago and NYRB have given American readers more access to Giono's work. I hope more people read him on this side of the pond. Four stars. I will continue to read more Giono.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

I write this trapped by a flood of Teslas in my peckerwood neighborhood, unable to leave the indoctrination center I just inserted the kid into (school). So, grain of salt for my vituperative tone…

Giono writes a bizarre love letter of sorts, cosplaying Melville’s life, if only briefly. Beyond being the first person to transliterate Moby-Dick into French (still the standard, apparently), the guy was still hungering for some more of that there Herman. Get you some! Can you blame him? Melville is a sexy bastard, if you’re into the whole Ulysses S. Grant thing.

Really, it’s as lithe as it is short. However odd it may be—to me, mind you—that Jean wanted to project his own thoughts onto the Melville mind by acting as his literary progenitor, he doesn’t fuck the dog and try imitative style or language. So, there’s that. Nary a maritime or antiquarian word to be found. Upper end of the middle of Giono’s work yet read, buffeted hugely by Edmund White’s informative intro. White, as ever, is a big asset to letters at-large. Yuge—

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

In addition to being an excellent novelist on his own, Jean Giono was a Herman Melville fanatic. In fact, he is responsible for the most frequently read translation of Moby-Dick into French. It was originally planned that he would also write an introduction. Instead, he wrote a work on fiction very loosely based on an episode in Melville's life, when he came to England to cut a deal for the British publication of White-Jacket. The result was Melville: A Novel, which is rather amusing because he envisions a kind of love affair with a young married woman who is trying to smuggle English wheat to help the starving Irish during the potato famine. It does not take into account that Melville was in reality bisexual.

This doesn't much matter because the story is interesting in its own right, as the fictional Melville tries to romance the lovely Adelina White during a multi-day mail coach ride from London to the West Coast of England.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twentieth-century French novelist Jean Giono is currently being introduced (or re-introduced by NYRB Classics) to American readers, and what better introduction than Giono's bio-fantasia about Herman Melville, now translated by Paul Eprile? Melville was published in 1941 in France, and written in the wake of Giono's own translation of Moby-Dick. The novella's swelling, excitable style, and its conversion of description into philosophical speculation, are obviously inspired by Ishmael's boisterous prose.

Giono does not tell Melville's whole life story but only narrates one partially-invented episode. Melville traveled to England in 1849 to arrange for the publication of White Jacket, but Giono imagines a fanciful journey within this factual one: Melville, freshly married to a somewhat conventional bride (and the child of a fastidious mother), is overcome with wanderlust in England and sick of writing marketable fiction. He gets himself outfitted in a sailor's costume and sets out, half at random, on a voyage to the countryside.

Unlike the Melville of contemporary academe (and of another striking twentieth-century French narrative, Claire Denis's Beau Travail), Giono's Melville seems entirely heterosexual; accordingly, he meets on the road and falls in love with Adeline White, a woman who is his intellectual and spiritual equal and who spends her time illicitly smuggling food to the starving Irish.

The above is about the extent of this short, lyrical novel as far as events go; the point is not a crowded plot but an examination of the desire to live a life consecrated to challenging the given and rising against the gods, whether in spirituality, art, or social life. According to Giono, the Biblical leitmotif of Melville's life is his "battle with the angel":

He never breathed a word of it to anyone. But plenty of times, since he came back from the sea, he's locked again in secret tussles with the wing-bearer. While he's been hunched over his manuscript, alone in his writing room, the angel has often leapt onto his shoulders from behind and grabbed hold of him. Grabbed hold of him with the terrible kind of grip that suddenly twists your neck a merciless sort of cruelty. Merciless: oh yes, no question about it! The cruelty that takes no account of weariness, of wants, of the right you have to live in peace. A right, after all, that you possess like everybody else: the right to live peacefully, while lying a little, ever so innocently, from time to time. Simply to live, to give up on grand resolutions, on yearnings for sacrifice, for self-denial, for things that are tough, things that are difficult to accomplish, things to which you have to drag yourself by the scruff of your own neck, things that wake you up in the night; to live like everybody else, with that great, complacent selfishness taught to us by all the churches and by all the powers that be; to travel the well-trodden roads, to hold the key to all the unbarred doors in everybody else's stairwells and corridors, to everybody else's bedrooms (short of venturing into the bedroom of Henry VIII…). To live, with one's wife, one's house, one's garden, one's modest job.

And Adeline, while not an artist, denounces the reductionism of economic theories and preaches an anti-calculus of love:

"Humans are the weakest creatures in the word because they're intelligent. Intelligence is, by definition, the art of turning a blind eye. If you want to remedy an ill, you can't turn a blind eye. For me, in this instance (choose your own, according to your nature), it's a twenty-year-old boy who's dying of starvation. He was born to live and to love.

"No dying person behaves better than someone who's starving to death: He doesn't speak, doesn't moan…he dies without making a fuss, lying on the ground….And most of the time he hides his face, as though he were ashamed. To him you can turn a blind eye the most easily. But have the courage (or the sentimentality, if you like) to lift that head up and look at that face, and you'll say to yourself: This man has to eat. He has to eat immediately.

"Then you won't think anymore about selling. You'll think about giving."

To use the language of Melville's Pierre, Giono's hero and heroine are chronometers rather than horologes, keeping heaven's time on earth while everyone else, whether in church or government, in marriage or at work, is just punching the clock. Both Melville and White (the reader of Moby-Dick will catch her surname's significance) are inspired in their ecstasies by the abundant example of nature, as Giono remarkably recreates the rolling landscape as only a slower sea.

Melville is a strange, buoyant little novel, one seeking to escape the spirit of its own grim time and place (Europe, 1941) in quest of a more hopeful and energetic age (Europe and America in the age of democratic upheaval)—even if, as at the novel's end, Melville's own hopes for love and art are, after Moby-Dick, shipwrecked.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'Necessary fiction' means merely that if I am writing about an historical figure - Vladimir Tatlin, Kafka, Walser, Pausanias, C. Musonius Rufus - I supply weather, rooms, samovars, Greek dust, Italian waiters, and so on, not in the historical record but plausible. It does not mean that I give fictional accounts." Hence Giono's Melville, too.

[Kyle C · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1849, when Melville returned to America after a short stay in England, he had a strange item in his baggage. It was an embalmed head...but it was his own.

So Jean Giono begins his genre-subverting novel—originally intended as a preface to his translation of Moby Dick, but in reality, more of a surreal biography of Herman Melville and a manifesto about poetic education. After his father died, Melville was forced to work at the age of fifteen at the New York State Bank with his uncle, but even at that age, he was possessed of a poetic sensitivity and desire for new experiences. While his early setback might have derailed his formal learning, his poetic soul was not dejected: "the heart of a poetic child holds more lashing masts and more billowing sails than all the ports in the world rolled together". Soon afterwards, Melville left the bank, joined a ship as a low-level sailor, toured the world and, on the side, began a successful career writing popular pot-boiler novels about maritime adventures. His novels were lucrative but spiritually empty.

In Giono's telling, Moby Dick comes as the repudiation of all this hackneyed genre fiction. Melville's novels are commercial hits but they are formulaic and conventional and he slowly realizes that, in order to be a poet, one has to be a rebel. At the end of the day, the real title of his work is always Melville, Melville, Melville, Melville. Every book should be an expression of himself, his own unique self, and he should stop feeling obliged to create what other people want him to create. When he meets a woman, an Irish nationalist named Adelina, it is then that his poetic genius acquires its true power—as they walk through the rainy countryside exchanging stories, they create a shared world of their own imagination: "he'd summoned the rain for himself and for her. He was enabling her to share his private world which, in a completely natural way, became her world...He imagined a world‚ unlike the real one, where he wouldn't lose her." It is a companionship which allows him to understand the conjuring power of storytelling, to summon worlds into existence and to bridge the private landscapes of individual minds. As he walks with Adelina, he comes to a grandiose idea of the power of the poet: "to be a poet is to stay a step ahead of human destiny."

Giono's novel has little to do with the historical Melville except in its broad strokes. It follows the chronology of his life and, in its effusive prose and luxuriating descriptions of nature, imitates Melville's style. But at its center is an encounter with a woman who helps him to appreciate that poetic craft is not honed through technical training but won by spiritual emancipation, an escape from the aesthetic homogeny of popular taste and the publishing industry.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great little read. Not much to it, it was quick once I started back into it, but it was truly a treat.

This was written as an "essay" to Jean Giono's translation of Moby-Dick into French, but it was much more. For me, it created a stronger appreciation for Melville's great novel. The fictional story created a passion that made Moby-Dick.

Give it a shot if you want.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I live to keep an eye on the gods."

An unusual little novel that fictates into reality an imaginary segue in the life of Herman Melville. Giono, whose pastoral-apocalypse novel Hill, I thoroughly enjoyed, was involved in the translation of Moby Dick into French and composed this weird little story as paean to one of his favorite writers. The intention is unclear and the result is a little wacky. Giono imagines a questing Melville in England, abandoning his wife, falling for a mysterious Irishwoman and wandering around the countryside in disguise.
This isn't a bad story, but its incongruity itself, which should be a strength on the strength of its sheer zaniness, is never really fleshed out. Apparently, Giono intended it as a kind of romantic segue explaining how Melville came about to write Dick but why theses events is never really made apparent. More of a curiosity than anything else...

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very quirky little novel that revolves around Melville's visit to London to sell his novel White Jacket. Giono was the French translator of Moby Dick, and Melville started out as a rather hybrid personal essay about Melville that turned into a novel. Lost me in the middle section, a wholly fabricated story about some Irish nationalist. Required reading for any Melville fanatic, but no reason for anyone else to even look at it.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes a lot of courage to make up a story about someone that lived a life as grand as Herman Melville did. But in the right hands, as Jean Giono has done, it can work magically. Written about Melville’s life right before he himself wrote Moby Dick it’s equal parts sad, tragic yet full of promise. This little novel (novella?) works on every level. Full disclosure, I’ve never read Moby Dick but will start very soon.

[Miles Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a weird novel that combines biography and magical realism into a narrative that is creative and good without ever rising to the level of being truly great. Giono's Melville is fascinating and alive; the chemistry between he and Adelina is palpable. My biggest complaint about *Melville* is that it is uneven; the second half of the book sparkles in a way the first part doesn't.

[Daniel Polansky]

A short novella about the artistic burden incurred by Herman Melville prior to writing Moby Dick. I thought it was kind of overwritten and tiring, but I have a really, really low threshold when it comes to writers writing about writing, so you might dig it more than I did.

[Mayk Can Şişman · Rating 2 out of 5]

bu metne ne kadar ‘önsöz’ denilebilir orası bence büyük bir soru işareti. kısacık olsa da maalesef ekseriyetle epey yoran bir okuma oldu benim için. ‘saygı duruşu’ harici melville’den bağımsız değerlendirilmesi daha mantıklı bir de tabii.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Goddess of Books let this one fall in my lap. This was a magical read. in the final season of my life (as my therapist termed it) there isn't much I would reread. This is the exception. Beautiful writing. Magical invitations to nature, and to falling in love. This book made me want to write poetry again. It's not about Melville, really at all. It's about the author I suspect, hiding inside the shadow of Melville. I suggest this book if you like magical mystical writing, that feels like poetry and fairy tales at their best.

[Brooke Salaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguing and creative "biography" of Herman Melville during the period just before he writes Moby Dick and thereafter. Prior to tackling his masterpiece he had written well-received but more stereotypical adventure stories. The book at hand tries to explain the new more dangerous direction his work took with Moby Dick by a) a guardian angel who issues a challenge to leave the easy path; b) his meeting with a mysterious woman while traveling by mail coach over a few days. This woman, Adeline White is a married mother, and smuggler of wheat to starving Irish victims of the potato famine. She sparks his imagination in various ways as he tries to fill in the gaps to her life story and when he spins tales and offers poetic observations for her about the natural world as they hike and ride through the English countryside. Haunting and heartfelt.

[Erica]

Loosely a biography of Melville written as the introduction to Giono's translation, the first in French. Poetic and intense, a ton of license taken here which shifts it definitely to the realm of fiction. Beautiful book, unique voice. Giono is a genius. Absolutely inspiring me to read Melville--definitely, at the very least, to read the hell out of his wiki.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bizarre and beautiful. Lines like "Blessed are those who walk in the furious beating of the angel's wings." I thought maybe that was Melville--much of the book is from his perspective, or a version of his--but it's Giono's.

[mwr · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

I do not know why this book exists. I understand the occasion for it's writing, a well known contemporary french author who is partly responsible for translating Moby Dick into french will probably boost the sales of said book by writing some introductory material for it, but I do not have any idea Giono decided that the introductory material he would write should be a biography of an fictionalized episode in extremely fictionalized Melville's life.

There are parts about the language that I love, and the who idea of the thing tickles me. If you're going to die it probably isn't worth adding this to the finite list of books you'll read, but I do not regret that I added it to mine.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully weird story, and a funny story behind the story: French author Giono is a big fan of Melville, especially Moby Dick. He works on a translation, and the publisher invites him to write an introduction. Somehow he writes this story instead, so it ends up being published separately as a novel. NYRB commissioned Edmund White to write the introduction, so of course I could not resist.

I gave it four stars because I enjoyed the book in its own right, and because I love Melville. Now I'm curious about other work by Jean Giono, too.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quirky little book, and potentially a fun way to warm up to read Moby-Dick. It’s good to read the introduction, though, so you don’t get mislead by too many of the poetic inaccuracies in the text.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The French are extremely strange people.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75. An strange little book that blends biography and autobiography to interesting, and often enjoyable, effect. Not a substantial work but compelling nonetheless.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very touching homage from Jean Giono to Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick.

4* Melville
TR The Horseman on the Roof
TR Colline

[Márcio · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Melville" pode ser dividido facilmente em duas parte, a primeira que se inicia com o nascimento do pequeno Herman, que se torna um homem grande, além de um grande homem, e vai até o seu retorno aos EUA após suas aventuras marítimas que resultaram em seus primeiros livros: "Typee", "Omoo", Mardi" e "Redburn".

A segunda parte se inicia com suas andanças pelas ruas de Londres, em 1849, quando foi tratar da publicação de "White-Jacket". E com duas livres até o seu retorno aos EUA, resolve se aventurar no interior da Inglaterra, quando conhece Adeline White, e se apaixonam, personagem totalmente fictícia.
Portanto, é um romance semi-biográfico sobre o autor de "Moby Dick".

Na verdade, Jean Giono, como aponta Edmund White em uma nota introdutória, utiliza-se de Melville e Adeline para contar, na segunda parte do livro, o amor vivido por um pouco mais de três décadas pelo próprio Giono com uma mulher casada.

É uma escrita poética, fluida, e que de certa forma aponta, mesmo que implicitamente, a importância de Herman Melville para a literatura mundial, ao menos ocidental.

[Clayton · Rating 2 out of 5]

The problem with writing fictional accounts of real writers is that you're working on the genius' home turf. Only Melville fans are going to read Melville and whatever its merits as a story might be, we all know that Giono's Melville sounds nothing like Melville, doesn't even seem to think like Melville. Whether he wants to or not, Giono is inviting comparison, and of course any hundred pages of Moby-Dick are going to be better than the hundred-odd pages of Melville, and the mind of the real Melville is a much more inviting place than that of Giono's burly, macho rambler.

When it comes to biography, Melville is like Shakespeare: we just don't know enough. The slim details of the life are incommensurate with the achievement of the work. But that mystery is part of the fun; no little explanation of the work will ever accommodate the grand whole that we can intuit from the shadows it casts.