| Product: |
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe |
| Date: |
21.08.00 (169 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Readable, brilliantly written
Disadvantages: No chapter divisions
We all know the story of Robinson Crusoe - but have you actually read it?
I read it for the first time in my life this year. I was astonished. The underlying idea, of survival against all the odds, is strong enough to motivate a fair number of spin-offs (Defoe wrote a couple himself), and even Desert Island Discs.
When you consider that it is claimed by some as one of the first novels to be written in the English language and that it is nearly 300 years old, it is astonishingly fresh.
The fact that I knew its story - even only in sketchy outline - did not at all detract from its power over me. I found myself quite gripped by Crusoe's heroic attempt to make bread! Sounds silly, but then read it and you will be surprised.
Defoe, always the spy, spending a great deal of his life passing himself off as something other than what he really was, and obsessed with secrecy, is determined to pass of Crusoe as authentic - a fact that is disguised by the fact that it is now published as a novel under his name. There is no question that it is hugely plausible.
It's full of unexpected implications - for colonialism, for what it means to be an individual, for what it takes to write a "realist" narrative, for religious belief (about which it is tantalisingly ambiguous).
Crusoe himself is an extraordinary phenomenon - phlegmatic, dogged, businesslike, and utterly sexless. A great Irishman regarded Crusoe as the archetypal Englishman.
Summary:
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Last comment:
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Shuyanin59 - 02.11.02 A good opinion. But please check out for other publications of the novel - they are subdivided into chapters (e.g., Penguin Classics). And it's the only drawback you've mentioned! |
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