After reading Submergence, with its watery thematic base, it is mildly amusing that a random selection from Melville House’s Art of the Novella series yields Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, a maritime adventure. Maritime is not a genre of the literary ecosystem I find seductive, but I found Melville’s story absorbing, though assuaged by its mere one hundred and twenty four pages.

A fictionalised account of a real event, Benito Cereno tells of a slave insurrection on a ship travelling in South America. The captain of an American merchant ship, Amasa Delano, boards to assist what he considers a ship in distress after illness, bad weather and probable incompetence. Delano discerns, but continually misreads, a more macabre misery. Understanding more than the captain, we observe and participate in his unease.

Melville’s tale has more of the quiet horror of a Edgar Allen Poe story, rather than the swashbuckling of Horatio Hornblower (this is an assumption, I have no direct knowledge of Hornblower). It was Dore’s Ancient Mariner etching that kept coming to mind.

[Read as part of Frances’s and Melville House’s The Art of the Novella Reading Challenge.]

August is the month of the Art of the Novella Reading Challenge, which begins today. The intention is to read all 42 novellas in the series. Being a reader that values attentive reading, it seems a daunting task, but I enjoy a challenge. My reading choices will be selected each day by my daughter, starting with Melville’s Benito Cereno.