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    Benito Cereno
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    Benito Cereno
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    Benito Cereno
    Audiobook3 hours

    Benito Cereno

    Written by Herman Melville

    Narrated by Pete Cross

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Captain Delano is approached on the open sea by a battered-looking ship lead by Captain Benito Cereno. Cereno, always accompanied by his personal slave Babo, explains that his crew was transporting a group of slaves from Africa when their ship was caught and damaged in severe weather. He is polite but always timid, and requests supplies for his ships remaining journey. Captain Delano agrees to help but begins to notice the strange social interactions and atmosphere of Cereno’s crew and the slaves. Delano begins to believe that Cereno is hiding something, and turns out to be right, as a climactic battle breaks out between the two crews, Benito Cereno greatest secret is uncovered.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateJul 14, 2016
    ISBN9781520015255
    Author

    Herman Melville

    Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet who received wide acclaim for his earliest novels, such as Typee and Redburn, but fell into relative obscurity by the end of his life. Today, Melville is hailed as one of the definitive masters of world literature for novels including Moby Dick and Billy Budd, as well as for enduringly popular short stories such as Bartleby, the Scrivener and The Bell-Tower.

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    Reviews for Benito Cereno

    3.5/5

    122 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Entertaining story, well written.
    • 4/5
      I have heard about this book from a friend of mine, who's read it with her book club, so I generally knew what to expect in terms of plot developments. I was however pleasantly surprised by the characters in this novella. They were all remarkable in one way or another and since they were all very distinct their differences stood out all the more. It seems that authors in the middle of the 19th century weren't afraid to make their characters full of personality, take Dickens for example, and Melville definitely followed the same tradition. I particularly enjoyed the character of the proprietor, who is the narrator of this story. He tries so hard to be on good terms with all of his employees, regardless of the trouble they cause him, and makes up excuses to not take any action that would make him look good in his own eyes. What I didn't expect is how plodding the pace is. Now that I've read Benito Cereno I think that's something that is common in Melville's work. The same type of scene seemed to repeat over and over without furthering the plot or developing the characters. The only thing this repetition seemed to accomplish was to convince me further of utter and complete spinelessness of the proprietor, but I already knew that so it wore on me. I did enjoy the ending though. It seemed somewhat abrupt because events moved along faster than the rest of the story but it was very satisfying. In a way it was the only appropriate ending, anything else wouldn't have worked quite as well. It also redeemed the proprietor in my eyes somewhat, he did have a good heart even if his will was lacking. Despite the extremely slow middle of the novella the ending saved it for me and for a few days after finishing it I kept thinking about the characters and the story. I can see why Melville is considered such an important figure in American literature and why this particular piece is still widely read. I would recommend Bartleby if you want to read a work that will inspire you to think about people, their motivations and how they relate to each other.
    • 4/5
      Great short story about revolting and scheming slaves. Who is controlling whom? A bit weird that everything is explained in detail in the last chapter.
    • 3/5
      This is tense and tight and moody like some kind of cross between a Poe story and Das Boot, which I never would have expected from Melville, who can be story-focused and atmospheric, sire, but in a way that is effaced (blown out of the water Pequod- --or Don Benito's ship under fire by the Americans, in this one--style) by his cosmic yearnings and baggymonstrosity. (Guy sends a lot of gauges up to 11!) It starts with a mystery--what's with this ship? Why are the blacks so creepily jaunty yet so eerily subdued? Who's in charge on this boat, anyway? The setup is golden. Melville limits himself to dramatizing the source material, though, and what that means is we get a novella of slave revolt on the high seas that has cannon battles and guys getting mutilated by the cruel negro and sympathy for the devil on a human level that gets completely subsumed within a larger allegory about global realpolitik, Delano as the early ugly naive lovable American running shit without even knowing. IT's hard to let Melville of the hook for that, but I think the problem is less that he was a man of his times who saw cruelty as cruelty and slavery as a policy debate, and more that he didn't give the story time to breathe, didn't flash us back to desperate negotiations and shocking developments on a ship of poor sods that means our world entire. The thing would have been to give us the perspective of one of the Africans, and for Cereno to be the serpent and Babo to be Ahab and Delano and his men to be the brutal ex machina. And in that sense, certainly, these are just the kind of openhearted, bouncing, paranoid farmboys that went to Afghanistan. This is less about slavery per se than an metaphor for the way America's handled its involvement in foreign disputes since day one--burn the village to save the village and then get a furrow of noncomprehension when you don't turn out to be the good guy any more than the slaves or the Spaniards. But that's ignoring--Melville's ignoring--that a story like this takes place against mass murder and rape and kidnapping and human trafficking right here in the good old US of A, acting like it's a foreign issue, pretending to a fairness that is bias itself like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. It's--ha--like that awful Black Eyed Peas song "Overseas, yeah, we try to stop terrorism / but we still got terrorists here livin' in the USA / the FBI, the CIA, the Bloods, the Crips, and the KKK". TBenito Cereno simplifies like the song simplifies--the blush every time you hear those stupid lyrics analogous to the interactions racked by etiquette between the two captains, the awkwardness to death that trumps even real death all around, and the impossibility in both cases of it turning into anything other than a bloodbath of the foreigner committed again by the well-meaning and clean. The climax feels cheap because the alternative is a closer look at the psychology of it, and Melville's not up for the complete cutting loose or condemnation of his Americans that the examination would make necessary for any feeling person.
    • 5/5
      I've read both Moby Dick and Billy Budd, but of the Melville works I've read, it's this novella I find most impressive. There's none of the windy digressions in Moby Dick or the heavy-handed allegory of Billy Budd or The Confidence-man here. This is as close as I've found in Melville to taut, subtle writing. If I have any criticism it is that it comes dangerously close to the "idiot plot." (For this to work, one of the characters has to act like an idiot.) From here on end though, to explain what I did find awesome in this, I have to discuss spoilers. And they are spoilers. I had heard of this story, of what this was about. This is one of Melville's more famous works. And I wish I hadn't known--it's best I think to come at this story without knowledge, and I wouldn't read any introduction beforehand. Spoiler below:In a way, I wonder if it is a spoiler, because not only was the situation obvious to me but Melville signals from the start his point of view character, Captain Amasa Delano, is not to be trusted. Early on he describes him as "singularly undistrustful." This is set in 1797 during the Atlantic slave trade. The captain of an American ship, Delano, comes aboard a Spanish ship captained by Benito Cereno. From the first Delano notices that not only are the blacks on deck, who greatly outnumber the whites, unshackled, but that they are sharpening weapons. Huge clues keep coming that Captain Cereno is captive and that there has been a slave revolt on board, but Delano remains clueless. The whole novella is one of the most starkly unreliable narratives I've ever read. But here's what I find interesting. Throughout the narrative many racial, in fact very racist, comments are made. But not only are we signaled the narrator is, well, an idiot, but many of the events of the novella flat out contradict those racist assumptions--for instance docility and stupidity--for the black slaves not only successfully revolted, they're fooling Delano despite what's right before his eyes. So, it made me wonder. Just what does Melville believe? And what does he want us to take away from this story? Given the time this was written (1855) my assumption would have been that Melville's sympathies were with the white crew, and that he'd certainly expect that's how his readers would see things. But so much in this novella subverts that easy assumption. And that I do find awesome. Even amazing given the year this was written.
    • 3/5
      At first seems like a sea story, then like a rather run-of-the-mill mystery novel, and then finally reveals itself (unless I'm overprojecting) to be a rather disturbing morality tale.spoiler:It forces us to ask to what degree Captain Delano represents ourselves, to conduct our own condemnation of the Americans but also, more importantly, of ourselves for (at least in my case) rooting for them.end spoilerAt first I was sure this wasn't a great book. Now I can see why it is, and if I read it again I think my appreciation will be twice as great the second time around.Oh, and this edition (Benito Cereno: A Text for Guided Research) is great because it has the actual memoirs of the real-life Amasa Delano, who is, incredibly, just as pigheaded as in the story, and whose story is just as bizarre.
    • 4/5
      Wowza. I don't even know what to say about Benito Cereno. This is my first Melville, believe it or not. I've never read his other works, and this is quite the introduction.Melville House says, "Based on a real-life incident--the character names remain unchanged--Benito Cereno tells what happens when an American merchant ship comes upon a mysterious Spanish ship where the nearly all-black crew and their white captain are starving and yet hostile to offers of help. Melville's most focused political work, it is rife with allusions (a ship named after Santa Domingo, site of the slave revolt led by Toussaint L'Ouverture), analogies (does the good-hearted yet obtuse American captain refer to the American character itself?) and mirroring images that deepen our reflections on human oppression and its resultant depravities."I'm assuming since Melville was born in New York and his grandparents hail from Boston, that he was anti-slavery. Since this was first published in 1855, my initial thoughts are that he writes this as a warning of sorts. Human oppression can only stand so much before it rises in revenge. If I understand the allusions and analogies correctly, this story is a scathing review of the naivete of the American north regarding slavery and of the emotional dependence the south has on it's slaves.This book stirs the racially-charged pot.
    • 4/5
      Slow, well-crafted story of evil and slavery and rebellion and deceit.
    • 1/5
      This was a boring book. It was short but I feel that I was reading a 1,000-page book. Its a book that you have a slight notion of what will happen next and thus just want to reach the climax. But the climax happened to far down the book. This book made me so sleepy I almost did not want to finish it.
    • 2/5
      "Benito Cereno" were never meant to be read only once. However, it took me some multiple reads into this short novel to make sense of the plot as the book need to be absorbed more than its meant to be read. Based on a true story, "Benito Cereno" was narrated by a very gullible unreliable narrator about a mysterious Spanish slave trade ship and its strange occupants. Like most thing in history about that time, the story basically centered about imperialism, slavery, white man burden, prejudices etc but its also a mystery and riddled with clues if you know where to look which made the story tolerable enough.

      I guess the story would interest those who are interested in reading a very difficult writing style with complete unreliable primary POV narrator and have an interest in dominance-submissive relationship of this book. In fact, this book is riddled with all kind of power play which was simply too horrifying to dwell on it too much. Various interpretation of "rape" was the core of this novel.

      I would have like it better if there are more clarity in the writing style of this book like Melville did with "Bartleby". I do think there's a way to write a rising action scene without the overuse of never-ending sentences. Besides the over comma paragraphs, I was supposed to have let Melville drag me along with his interpretation of the situation because of his familiarity with his nautical experiences. But I don't think the author nor the narrator offer us some degree of flawed humanity in the situation via the apparent ignorance prevailing until the climax of the story.

      This book are meant to be read and reread. Its unavoidable to empathize with this novel to a degree considering that it shows the ugliness and flawed nature in everyone in the book. Its not meant to be likable but it is meant to be digested and its a strong novel like John Steinbeck's The Pearl but you really need a hard stomach to withstand the underlying message and various interpretations of this book.
    • 5/5
      I've always felt this was actually Melville's best work.
    • 5/5
      Great story. Good narration. Love the twist in the story.