Mardi

Herman Melville’s third book starts as a straightforward South Seas yarn and then breaks its own rails. An American sailor jumps ship from a whaler, rescues a fair-skinned maiden named Yillah from death, and loses her again almost at once. His search for her becomes a voyage through Mardi, an invented archipelago whose islands stand for nations, philosophies, and the follies of the age. Readers who came for adventure found instead a long, restless meditation on love, politics, and belief, and the book sank commercially. Later critics saw in its ambition a rehearsal for Moby-Dick. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings back one of Melville’s strangest and boldest experiments.