Norfolk Isle & the Chola widow
by Herman Melville 
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The Chola Widow is one of ten sketches Herman Melville wrote as part of The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. As such, it is a short piece that can easily be read in one brief sitting. When a story like this gets the fine press treatment, one gets to enjoy reading all the way through the book, literally enjoying it from cover to cover. The story gets to stand on it’s own without being stuffed into a collection. The press gets to select illustrations, type, paper, and other design aspects that can heighten the impact of reading the story. David Pascoe of the Nawakum Press has certainly done that here.
It starts with the patterned paper used to cover the boards; a seemingly endless series of waves rolling across the cover of the book. The show more spume from the waves rolling constantly into the shoreline of the Encantadas is probably more whitish than the cream of the mould-made Rives Heavyweight paper but the wave theme plays out as the book opens up and the deckle edge of the paper hints of the appearance of the surf-line along the beach. The masterful illustrations by Rik Olson take us in a progression along with the story. First a birds-eye view of the rescuing ship, followed by Hunilla gazing out to sea and hesitating before finally waving her headscarf and catching the pisco-sharpened eye of one of the sailors. Then we are taken backwards to visualize the “death in a silent picture” that widowed her, and the reed upon which she recorded the days to prove that the oath-bound captain would not be returning to pick her up. The last view of our heroine that Olson gives us is Hunilla sitting stoically in the prow of the longboat pulling away from her home of three long years. Even without reading the text, this book is a joy to flip through.
In our narrator’s first glimpse of Hunilla, he states
“It is not artistic heartlessness, but I wish I could but draw in crayons; for this woman was a most touching sight, and crayons, tracing softly melancholy lines, would best depict the mournful image of the dark-damasked Chola widow.”
Later, after hearing her story, he pays her further tribute:
“As mariners, tossed in tempest on some desolate ledge, patch them a boat out of the remnants of their vessel’s wreck, and launch it in the self-same waves, see here Hunilla, this lone shipwrecked soul, out of treachery invoking trust. Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee, not in the laurelled victor, but in this vanquished one.”
So well did Olson infuse her portrait with the spirit of these paragraphs that I believe the narrator would have forgiven him the use of wood engravings and ink.
I read the excellent introduction by John Bryant first, only to find him recommending reading it after the story in the last paragraph of the introduction. No matter. It works either way. He tells us that the reading of “The Chola Widow” is
“…an exercise that prepares us for reading all of Melville from Typee to Billy Budd, and the human condition. The lesson is this: despite Melville’s legendary ability to render the world in concrete detail. He makes us see that what we think we see—man, woman, whale—is a distant mirror of ourselves and all we really can see is the distance between one’s self and the other we hope to know.”
Indeed, in Moby Dick, Melville stuffed so many details pertaining to whales and whaling that many people are put off. One was sometimes tempted to skip the dissertation on cetology and get on with the story. In Chola Widow, there is much more left up to the reader’s imagination and expectations.
I’ve now read The Chola Widow cover to cover twice now and anticipate many more readings to come. Many more chances to ponder what heinous events occurred during Hunilla’s years on the island and again in her mind during the silences of her story. Instead of filling in her silences, Melville gives us this, again through the recollection of our narrator:
“If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid. But in all things man sows upon the wind, which bloweth just there wither it listeth; for ill or good man cannot know. Often ill comes from good, as good from ill.”
I will definitely be seeking out more of Melville’s other works. If I can find them in a fine press edition that is anything close to this Nawakum Press edition, so much the better for the Whole Book Experience.
AVAILABILITY: The 25 deluxe copies are out of print but I believe that there are still a handful of slip-cased copies available. The Nawakum website has excellent info on the books and many pictures showing the two states. There is also an interesting video of the printing process that is very fun to watch.
NOTE: The Whole Book Experience would like to thank David Pascoe and the Nawakum Press for the generosity that made this review possible.
For more book reviews, including the physical book and overall reading experience, visit my blog The Whole Book Experience at http://www.thewholebookexperience.com/ show less
It starts with the patterned paper used to cover the boards; a seemingly endless series of waves rolling across the cover of the book. The show more spume from the waves rolling constantly into the shoreline of the Encantadas is probably more whitish than the cream of the mould-made Rives Heavyweight paper but the wave theme plays out as the book opens up and the deckle edge of the paper hints of the appearance of the surf-line along the beach. The masterful illustrations by Rik Olson take us in a progression along with the story. First a birds-eye view of the rescuing ship, followed by Hunilla gazing out to sea and hesitating before finally waving her headscarf and catching the pisco-sharpened eye of one of the sailors. Then we are taken backwards to visualize the “death in a silent picture” that widowed her, and the reed upon which she recorded the days to prove that the oath-bound captain would not be returning to pick her up. The last view of our heroine that Olson gives us is Hunilla sitting stoically in the prow of the longboat pulling away from her home of three long years. Even without reading the text, this book is a joy to flip through.
In our narrator’s first glimpse of Hunilla, he states
“It is not artistic heartlessness, but I wish I could but draw in crayons; for this woman was a most touching sight, and crayons, tracing softly melancholy lines, would best depict the mournful image of the dark-damasked Chola widow.”
Later, after hearing her story, he pays her further tribute:
“As mariners, tossed in tempest on some desolate ledge, patch them a boat out of the remnants of their vessel’s wreck, and launch it in the self-same waves, see here Hunilla, this lone shipwrecked soul, out of treachery invoking trust. Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee, not in the laurelled victor, but in this vanquished one.”
So well did Olson infuse her portrait with the spirit of these paragraphs that I believe the narrator would have forgiven him the use of wood engravings and ink.
I read the excellent introduction by John Bryant first, only to find him recommending reading it after the story in the last paragraph of the introduction. No matter. It works either way. He tells us that the reading of “The Chola Widow” is
“…an exercise that prepares us for reading all of Melville from Typee to Billy Budd, and the human condition. The lesson is this: despite Melville’s legendary ability to render the world in concrete detail. He makes us see that what we think we see—man, woman, whale—is a distant mirror of ourselves and all we really can see is the distance between one’s self and the other we hope to know.”
Indeed, in Moby Dick, Melville stuffed so many details pertaining to whales and whaling that many people are put off. One was sometimes tempted to skip the dissertation on cetology and get on with the story. In Chola Widow, there is much more left up to the reader’s imagination and expectations.
I’ve now read The Chola Widow cover to cover twice now and anticipate many more readings to come. Many more chances to ponder what heinous events occurred during Hunilla’s years on the island and again in her mind during the silences of her story. Instead of filling in her silences, Melville gives us this, again through the recollection of our narrator:
“If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid. But in all things man sows upon the wind, which bloweth just there wither it listeth; for ill or good man cannot know. Often ill comes from good, as good from ill.”
I will definitely be seeking out more of Melville’s other works. If I can find them in a fine press edition that is anything close to this Nawakum Press edition, so much the better for the Whole Book Experience.
AVAILABILITY: The 25 deluxe copies are out of print but I believe that there are still a handful of slip-cased copies available. The Nawakum website has excellent info on the books and many pictures showing the two states. There is also an interesting video of the printing process that is very fun to watch.
NOTE: The Whole Book Experience would like to thank David Pascoe and the Nawakum Press for the generosity that made this review possible.
For more book reviews, including the physical book and overall reading experience, visit my blog The Whole Book Experience at http://www.thewholebookexperience.com/ show less
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Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was born into a seemingly secure, prosperous world, a descendant of prominent Dutch and English families long established in New York State. That security vanished when first, the family business failed, and then, two years later, in young Melville's thirteenth year, his father died. Without show more enough money to gain the formal education that professions required, Melville was thrown on his own resources and in 1841 sailed off on a whaling ship bound for the South Seas. His experiences at sea during the next four years were to form in part the basis of his best fiction. Melville's first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were partly romance and partly autobiographical travel books set in the South Seas. Both were popular successes, particularly Typee, which included a stay among cannibals and a romance with a South Sea maiden. During the next several years, Melville published three more romances that drew upon his experiences at sea: Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both fairly realistic accounts of the sailor's life and depicting the loss of innocence of central characters; and Mardi (1849), which, like the other two books, began as a romance of adventure but turned into an allegorical critique of contemporary American civilization. Moby Dick (1851) also began as an adventure story, based on Melville's experiences aboard the whaling ship. However, in the writing of it inspired in part by conversations with his friend and neighbor Hawthorne and partly by his own irrepressible imagination and reading of Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists Melville turned the book into something so strange that, when it appeared in print, many of his readers and critics were dumbfounded, even outraged. By the mid-1850s, Melville's literary reputation was all but destroyed, and he was obliged to live the rest of his life taking whatever jobs he could find and borrowing money from relatives, who fortunately were always in a position to help him. He continued to write, however, and published some marvelous short fiction pieces Benito Cereno" (1855) and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) are the best. He also published several volumes of poetry, the most important of which was Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), poems of occasionally great power that were written in response to the moral challenge of the Civil War. His posthumously published work, Billy Budd (1924), on which he worked up until the time of his death, became Melville's last significant literary work, a brilliant short novel that movingly describes a young sailor's imprisonment and death. Melville's reputation, however, rests most solidly on his great epic romance, Moby Dick. It is a difficult as well as a brilliant book, and many critics have offered interpretations of its complicated ambiguous symbolism. Darrel Abel briefly summed up Moby Dick as "the story of an attempt to search the unsearchable ways of God," although the book has historical, political, and moral implications as well. Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, at age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York, along with his wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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