Rating: 
Summary: Narrative account
Review: Typee is a narrative account of the three months that Herman Melville spent among the Typee tribe after deserting from a whaling ship. It goes into minute details about the everyday life of the Typee. At times I felt a bit glassy eyed and skimmed forward over some sections.Melville comes across a bit dense and self centered, and obviously applied a double standard, one for whites and one for natives. After toying with the affections of a young native woman, he casually abandons her and does not seem to understand why her family would object. Perhaps he would have had a better understanding if he was abandoning the daughter of a prominant politician in New England. He was somewhat a nosy Parker, inserting himself in situations where he was not wanted, and showing little regard for the customs of the Typee. Overall, it is an interesting account of life among the natives.
Rating:
Summary: Narrative account
Review: Typee is a narrative account of the three months that Herman Melville spent among the Typee tribe after deserting from a whaling ship. It goes into minute details about the everyday life of the Typee. At times I felt a bit glassy eyed and skimmed forward over some sections. Melville comes across a bit dense and self centered, and obviously applied a double standard, one for whites and one for natives. After toying with the affections of a young native woman, he casually abandons her and does not seem to understand why her family would object. Perhaps he would have had a better understanding if he was abandoning the daughter of a prominant politician in New England. He was somewhat a nosy Parker, inserting himself in situations where he was not wanted, and showing little regard for the customs of the Typee. Overall, it is an interesting account of life among the natives.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting
Review: Typee was Melville's first book. The great symbolic prose of Moby Dick is not to be seen here, but it is interesting to get a sense of the development of Melville's writing. This book is a semi-fictional account of Melville's experiences in the South Seas. While his own visit was a brief one, the hero of this book ends up in the Typee Valley for four months. Melville used numerous current accounts in order to flesh out this story. A strong point of this Riverside edition is that it also includes several of these sources, so that the reader can get a sense of what else was available on South Island life at the time. Most of these contemporary sources are imperialistic or surprisingly inaccurate. This is a good read for those who are interested in the development of cross-cultural relations between Westerners and the natives of the South Seas. Not surprisingly, Westerners come out in a bad light. It will make you question what the word 'civilization' means.
Rating:
Summary: More local color than adventure...
Review: Typee was the first work by Herman Melville to actually make him a known writer. It it a quasi-fictional account of his actual experience living among a group of canibals on a South Seas near- paradise. Melville's central character, Tommo, is Melville, and his experiences are broadened to four months instead of Melville's actual four weeks. Melville uses the work to comment freely on the conflict between civilization's growing encroachment upon an unspoiled paradise and the evils that civilization wrought. He also launches into repetitive descriptions of the island of Nukuheva which Melville feels is typical of the lush verdant beauty of all of the Polynesian islands. I taught this book for two years back in the 70's with a group of American literature students. I decided to revive it this year (1998)with a group of honors juniors (American Literature)at my high school. Oddly enough, the book seemed to be more favorably received this year than a couple of decades ago. Some students complained of its repetitive nature, particularly the descriptions, but most found it enjoyable and thought-provoking. The book must be considered in light of the Romantic Era from which it emerged. Accounts of far-off exotic isles and high order adventure were the order of the day. In addition, the blind love of Nature and the admiration of the Rousseau's "noble savage" are hallmarks of the book. One must also think what readers in the 1800's thought of the sensual side of the book. Exotic descriptions of naked island girls, in particular Tommo's lovely Fayaway, left a lot up to the imagination of nineteenth century readers. Whether Tommo's relationship with Fayaway is merely platonic or highly physical is left to the reader to decide though it hints at the latter. Also of interest is Melville's condemnation of missionary work. Though at one point he concedes that the principle of bringing Christianity is good, he admonishes that the islanders should be civilized with benefits not crimes as was then more often the case. I found the book very enjoyable the second time around and would recommend it to teachers as an alternative to Moby Dick or Billy Budd as a representative work of Melville or Amercian Romanticism.
Rating:
Summary: Typee, one of Melville's first works, is still worth reading
Review: Typee was the first work by Herman Melville to actually make him a known writer. It it a quasi-fictional account of his actual experience living among a group of canibals on a South Seas near- paradise. Melville's central character, Tommo, is Melville, and his experiences are broadened to four months instead of Melville's actual four weeks. Melville uses the work to comment freely on the conflict between civilization's growing encroachment upon an unspoiled paradise and the evils that civilization wrought. He also launches into repetitive descriptions of the island of Nukuheva which Melville feels is typical of the lush verdant beauty of all of the Polynesian islands. I taught this book for two years back in the 70's with a group of American literature students. I decided to revive it this year (1998)with a group of honors juniors (American Literature)at my high school. Oddly enough, the book seemed to be more favorably received this year than a couple of decades ago. Some students complained of its repetitive nature, particularly the descriptions, but most found it enjoyable and thought-provoking. The book must be considered in light of the Romantic Era from which it emerged. Accounts of far-off exotic isles and high order adventure were the order of the day. In addition, the blind love of Nature and the admiration of the Rousseau's "noble savage" are hallmarks of the book. One must also think what readers in the 1800's thought of the sensual side of the book. Exotic descriptions of naked island girls, in particular Tommo's lovely Fayaway, left a lot up to the imagination of nineteenth century readers. Whether Tommo's relationship with Fayaway is merely platonic or highly physical is left to the reader to decide though it hints at the latter. Also of interest is Melville's condemnation of missionary work. Though at one point he concedes that the principle of bringing Christianity is good, he admonishes that the islanders should be civilized with benefits not crimes as was then more often the case. I found the book very enjoyable the second time around and would recommend it to teachers as an alternative to Moby Dick or Billy Budd as a representative work of Melville or Amercian Romanticism.
Rating:
Summary: Prisoner in paradise
Review: Under the influence of Defoe's journalistic style, Herman Melville wrote "Typee," a combination of travelogue and novel about some weeks he had spent as a guest-turned-prisoner of a tribe of savages on a South Pacific island. How much of the account is fact rather than fiction is difficult to deduce from the tone of Melville's presentation, but the question of veracity doesn't diminish the entertainment value, because "Typee" is a colorfully detailed adventure yarn that reads like National Geographic crossed with Boys' Life.
Melville is serving as a sailor on a whaling ship called the Dolly which is cruising the South Pacific and lands on the island of Nukuheva in the Marquesas, among the easternmost of the archipelagoes in the vast group known collectively as Polynesia. Deserting the ship because of the captain's tyranny, he and another like-minded crew member, named Toby, plunge into the mountainous wilderness of Nukuheva with the plan of later obtaining passage on another ship leaving the island, which has heavy French marine traffic. They enter an isolated valley inhabited by a tribe called the Typees, who invite them to live in their community. Melville and Toby accept the invitation because they have nowhere else to go for the time being, and the Typees seem friendly despite their reputation as cannibals.
The Typees treat Melville (who has told them his name is Tom) extremely well, but they refuse to release him from captivity; Toby meanwhile has gone off to the harbors for medical relief but never returns, leaving Melville to describe the customs and activities of the Typees. Their religion is festive, but they have a strange relationship with their gods, whom they berate by abusing their idols. Their language, which has a tendency to double words, is quite comical to English-trained ears, as for example in their designation of the French merchants as "wee-wees." The girls and the scenery are fantastically beautiful, but there are also dangers, such as the Happars, the rival tribe who occasionally wage war against the relatively placid Typees. Of special note is a young warrior named Kory-Kory whose brotherly affection for Melville could very well have inspired the character of Queequeg in "Moby-Dick."
The implications of the story are fairly simple, if overromanticized: Civilized man confronts the noble savage, discovers they are skilled artisans and healers and primarily peaceful fruit-eaters who eat human flesh only when it is that of their vanquished enemies; and, upon astonished reflection, realizes the corruption and the hypocritical facades of his own technologically advanced society. What would now be called political correctness was in the 1840s merely a perspective by an observant world traveler with no ideological agenda to push. But, although the valley of the Typees may be a paradise, it's not Melville's paradise, which is why he endeavors to escape his gracious hosts. It's a good thing he eventually did, because he had better books waiting to be written.
Rating:
Summary: More local color than adventure...
Review: Yes, it was a fun read, and my rating reflects not whether Melville succeeded in what he was trying to do - rather, my rating is a reflection on my enjoyment level. The imagery is beautiful in this intensely pictorial novel. The scene where the narrator's Polynesian "girlfriend" acts as a sail during his canoeing jaunt in the lagoon is one of my favorite mental snapshots, not only from this novel, but from American Romantic literature as a whole. But, just when one is relaxing into the somnolent atmosphere, Melville gives us pages upon pages of breadfruit recipies as well as detailed descriptions on the manufacture of tappa. All very informative, and in keeping with Melville's intentions in writing this travel novel, but these passages turned me off a bit. His next novel, Omoo, is laugh aloud funny, and a superior adventure novel to Typee.
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