Résumé
Résumé de Les Contes de la véranda
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who love short fiction that lingers, stories about hidden motives, and nineteenth century prose with dark humor.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
The Piazza Tales is a book of six stories by Herman Melville, published in 1856. Five of them first appeared in Putnam's Monthly, in the years after Moby-Dick had met with little favor. Melville gathered them into one volume and wrote a new opening piece, The Piazza, to serve as a doorway. The book was his way of earning a living with short fiction while still following his strange and restless mind.
What do you get? A lawyer's office on Wall Street, a Spanish ship drifting off the coast of Chile, a farmhouse in a thunderstorm, the barren Galápagos Islands, and a bell tower in Italy. Each tale hides a puzzle. Characters misread one another, trust the wrong signs, or meet something they cannot explain. Let us begin where Melville does, on the porch of a country house.
Dans ce résumé
- 1A porch that frames the storiesFree
- 2A clerk who prefers not to
- 3A ship where nothing is as it seems
- 4A salesman who sells fear
- 5Islands that enchant and punish
- 6A tower built on pride
Point clé 1 sur 6
A porch that frames the stories
The book opens with The Piazza, told by a narrator who has bought an old farmhouse in the hills of western Massachusetts. The house has no porch, so he builds one, which he calls a piazza, and he faces it toward the great bulk of Mount Greylock. From there he watches the weather paint the mountain in changing colors, and he feels like a man sitting in a theater of nature.
One day he notices a small bright speck high on a distant slope. He takes it for a marvelous palace or a fairy dwelling and cannot stop thinking about it. The longing grows until he decides to leave his comfortable seat and go and find it.
The journey is a little comic. Yet the tone carries a quiet seriousness. He is a man who loves the look of things, and he wants to learn what lies behind the look.
This sets the pattern for the whole collection. Again and again, someone watches from a safe distance and builds a story about what he sees. The porch is a place for looking, and the later tales ask how much a looker can truly know. Pleasant surfaces in this book rarely tell the full story.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Who’s who
- The Narrator of The Piazza
- A dreamy country householder who builds a mountain-facing porch and seeks the source of a distant light.
- Bartleby
- A quiet Wall Street copyist whose polite refusals unsettle his employer, the Lawyer.
- The Lawyer
- Bartleby's cautious employer and narrator, who struggles to understand his clerk and his own responsibilities.
- Amasa Delano
- An American sea captain who boards Benito Cereno's troubled ship and offers assistance.
- Benito Cereno
- The anxious Spanish captain of the San Dominick, attended closely by Babo during Delano's visit.
- Babo
- Benito Cereno's constant attendant, whose apparently devoted service attracts the visiting Amasa Delano's attention.
- Hunilla
- A woman encountered in the island sketches, enduring isolation and hardship on a barren shore.
- Bannadonna
- A proud Italian builder and inventor whose ambitious bell tower promises distinction for his city.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 81,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 5 h 25 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 13 other languages
Questions about Les Contes de la véranda
What is The Piazza Tales about?
It is a collection of six stories by Herman Melville. They include a Wall Street clerk who refuses to work, a slave ship mystery, a lightning-rod salesman, sketches of the Galápagos and a fable about a bell tower.
What stories are in The Piazza Tales?
The six pieces are The Piazza, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, The Lightning-Rod Man, The Encantadas, and The Bell-Tower. Most first appeared in magazines before being gathered into this book in 1856.
What does I would prefer not to mean in Bartleby?
It is the polite phrase Bartleby uses to refuse his employer's requests. Readers see it as passive resistance, a sign of despair, or a puzzle about freedom, and the story never settles on one meaning.
Is Benito Cereno based on a true story?
Yes, it draws on the real voyage account of Captain Amasa Delano, an American sea captain who met a Spanish ship in the early 1800s. Melville reshaped the material heavily to build his own story.
Is The Piazza Tales hard to read?
The stories are short and vivid. Bartleby and The Lightning-Rod Man are easiest to start with.