The Passages of Herman Melville - Hardcover

Who would have thought it would have taken until now, the twenty-first century, to get a clear view of America's most mysterious novelist, Herman Melville? We have it now, through the magic of Jay Parini's superior novel -- Gore Vidal In fiction and biography, Jay Parini has brought to life Tolstoy, Frost, Faulkner, Benjamin, and Steinbeck. Now he has added Herman Melville to that remarkable pantheon, and the tale is surprising, insightful, and deeply moving. Melville has never seemed more alive to me - and more human. -- Chris Bohjalian, author of Secrets of Eden, The Double Bind, and Midwives Once again Jay Parini has taken us in literary imagination, cultural history, and biography through his ingenious fiction. In elegant and moving prose, Parini opens up Melville..... A novel of startling and inventive journeys, and no reader will come away from it seeing Melville the same. -- Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate Jay Parini, against all odds, captures his white whale of a subject and then frees him for us to behold. [He] re-animates Melville to startling effect: the creator walks as a character; the genius turns back into a husband; imperishable literature springs from the accidents of life. -- Tom Mallon, author of Fellow Travelers and Henry and Clara

'Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man . . .' Herman Melville Descend into the dark waters of one of the greatest writers America has ever produced. In this stirring novel Jay Parini recreates the adventure-filled life and ignominious death of Herman Melville. Partly told from the perspective of his wife, Lizzie, the story opens with an aging, angry and drunken Melville wreaking domestic havoc in his unhappy New York home. From there it takes in the full span of a life that produced Moby-Dick and Billy Budd: shipping off to sea on a merchant vessel as an impoverished young aristocrat, a fateful voyage on a whaling ship, desertion in the Marquesas Islands and a sojourn with cannibals, instant fame as a novelist and the disappointments of his twilight years trudging the docks as a Customs Inspector. Along the way Parini navigates the torrid personal relationships and barely suppressed desires that defined Melville's life. Jay Parini creates a Melville who is at once sympathetic and maddening. His novel pays tributes to the great works of the nineteenth century, and delivers a gripping historical drama.