Роман създаден преди над 300 години, който все още безусловно вълнува читателите си!

Сам съм го чел няколко пъти на невръстна възраст и бях удивен от находчивостта и уменията за оцеляване на Робинзон Крузо, захвърлен на самотен остров след жестока буря и корабокрушение.

Всякакви опити да го изкарат расистки, възхваляващ колонизацията и утвърждаващ превъзходството на белия човек, са не само несъстоятелни, но и клонят от смешни към жалки. Може би не е лошо хулителите му да се позапознаят с живота и делото на автора му.

Все едно ще му накривят капата на Даниел Дефо!

P.S. "Робинзон Крузо" е писана по истински случай!

~1⭐️~ no.❤️
This man deserved a coconut in the head from page 20.
It would've been a much more entertaining read.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If I would've been one of those savages I would've eaten this man alive, then barf him out into the ocean.
Das it, ✨tHaNk yOu✨
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Who could've thought reading about a white male stuck on an island for 25+ years would be so boring? Not the education system, I'll give you that.

This book was also filled with religious colonialism, propaganda and fanaticism and with a deep layer of racism and xenophobia.

You know what baffles me every time? That books like this one not only are they never banned but also called timeless masterpieces that are taught in school.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
75% update: They shot people and our dear Crusoe said "In the name of God"☺️

زیربنایی که ماجراجویی‌های رابینسون را ممکن ساخته، همان گفتمان مسلط قرن هجدهم تا نیمۀ اول قرن بیستم است؛ مبنی بر سروری و برتری مرد سفیدپوست اروپایی که مأموریت تمدن‌سازی در دنیا را به عهده دارد. جزیرۀ تصویرشده در رمان، نماد حاشیۀ اروپاست که با تسخیر آن به دست رابینسون، جزئی از ملک اروپا می‌شود. بنابراین، این اثر را می‌توان گامی فرهنگی در راستای تأیید تفکر اروپامحوری و حمایت از گسترش مرزها در جغرافیای شرق و جنوب دید

نسبت به اولین باری که این کتاب را خواندم، یعنی 10 سال پیش، هم من عوض شده‌ام و هم کتاب. تنها چیزی که از آن زمان تغییری نکرده حسادت من است به رابینسون. این نهایت شادکامی است؛ که در جزیره‌ای دورافتاده تنها باشی و قرار نباشد هر روز صبح که بیدار می‌شوی آدم‌ها را تحمل کنی

Oxford World's Classics edition ed. by Thomas Keymer.
I'd always wanted to *have read* the originals of stories like this, that are most famous in children's fairytale abridgements. But apart from Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which I read as a teenager because there was a yellowed old paperback in the house, I'd never bothered. I wanted to *have read* them, but didn't think I'd enjoy the reading process. (Gulliver's Travels only confirmed this.)

Robinson Crusoe did have its longueurs, and even most parts I enjoyed were relatively slow reading, but it was fascinating, historically and psychologically - also to watch a new form, the novel in English, trying to find its feet like a clumsy baby animal. I even connected with it personally, in ways I never expected from its reputation. Most popular discussion of the book relates to Crusoe's interaction with Friday, who doesn't even appear until about ¾ of the way into the novel.

It's also a great example of how important it is to read contextual material for a book this old. Thomas Keymer's introduction to Tom Jones (Penguin), was excellent, so I was glad to see he'd also edited Crusoe. (I also really like the cover of this edition, with its 18th-century woodcut comic-strip.) There are dozens of Goodreads reviews by readers apparently unaware that (as is explained by Keymer) Crusoe's repeated talk of the island as his kingdom was part of an elaborate satire and allegory of James II and Jacobites stretching throughout the novel. Defoe wasn't, and probably didn't intend the reader to be, entirely on Crusoe's side; this is part of the slipperiness of the text as an emergent novel: the conventions of the unreliable narrator were not yet set, Crusoe does not always fit them, and Defoe's own views are not always clear.

Reading Tom Jones (1749), Oroonoko (1688), and now Crusoe (1719) this year, I've realised how important and how divisive Jacobitism was in English culture and politics for decades, and how the memory of the 1685 Monmouth rebellion rankled as long as its veterans lived. In Tom Jones, set during the '45 uprising and invasion, the level of public partisanship and debate made it a lot like reading about the current Brexit situation. The 18th century had a lot of attention in TV documentaries and pop culture over the last twenty years or so, but the pervasiveness of Jacobitism and Hanoverianism was usually overlooked - whereas it's very apparent in this small sample of surviving novels. (Tho it's barely mentioned in the quarter of Pamela (1740) I've read at time of writing this post.)

An early surprise was that Crusoe's father was a Continental European immigrant, Kreutznaer. I'd always assumed 'Crusoe' to be of the same stable of English surnames ending with o-sounds as [Bobby] Shaftoe, [Alan] Sillitoe, and Chatto [& Windus] - but no, it's Anglicised German! Oddly topical to find this in one of the foundation texts of English literature, reading during the Brexit turmoil. (It's probably a Hanoverian reference - the dad, more sober-minded and sensible than his reckless, arrogant son Robinson, was from Bremen.) For years I've been aware of early-modern German immigration to Poland, and at time of writing this review, I'm reading Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) which has several references to German immigrants Russia and Ukraine: they were moving both eastwards and westwards.

I don't think Keymer is as good on Crusoe as he was on Tom Jones. This edition's notes (by James Kelly) on some aspects of Crusoe are also patchy - especially the variable level of information about wildlife and the political circumstances of areas in Africa. In the intro, Keymer doesn't cover the popular reception and adaptation of Defoe's novel, so important in global cultural history - not only for apparently creating a new basic plot-type, but politically. It is nonetheless easy to see how, as the 18th and then 19th centuries wore on (and Jacobitism fell from popular consciousness), Crusoe's attitudes, in this book that became beloved of British boys, helped to fuel the imperialist-colonialist mindset. Not since I read the Iliad have I encountered a book that so blatantly read that way.

Keymer mounts an interesting defence which, in combination with the novel itself, I found, at first, somewhat more convincing than the similar defence I'd read of Heart of Darkness several years ago. In this recent podcast, two academics call Conrad "a racist anti-racist" and Heart of Darkness "a racist critique of racism", which nails that more succinctly. By the end of Crusoe I thought there may be a similar ambiguity in Defoe's take on slavery. The defence rests on a lacuna. Crusoe is being punished by God, through the means of isolation. He becomes aware of the reasons why - or most of the reasons: failure to listen to previous warnings, greed, and not being content with his already adequate lot, first as a merchant's son who shunned his parents' advice, and secondly as a plantation owner who was doing well financially before he overreached by going on a new voyage to increase his wealth. One can, like Keymer, think of Crusoe as also being punished for enslaving other people (on the plantation, and sailing to capture and enslave yet more) when he has every reason to know better, having spent several years as a slave himself to Moors, where, as a pretty young man, he was used as a sex/rape slave as well as for chores. But the novel is silent as to whether Crusoe was also being punished for enslaving others. The silence may illustrate Crusoe's incomplete self-awareness - or a colonialist mindset in which slavery was a fact of life, decades before abolitionists became a political force. Keymer plumps for the former in the light of Defoe's other work. (Which was not entirely consistent because he was a mercenary journalist who would write almost anything to keep the wolf from the door - but he did write another novel, Captain Singleton, with a Quaker hero who was clearly anti-slavery.) By the end of the book, I was less convinced about this structure in which Crusoe is unwittingly punished for enslaving people. He prospers after his return to Europe, still not having denounced slavery, and the story arc by that point seems like more of an adventure /wish fulfilment fantasy than a parable. (However, as a succession of classic novels with religious content have reminded me over the last few months, devout Christians consider that God moves in mysterious ways and it is not for people to understand all his actions. Or would that just be an excuse for a messy early novel, full of holes and repetitions, that never saw a modern editor?)

21st century readers know the outcomes of colonialism - and view Robinson Crusoe from that perspective. In the novel, though, the psychological world of early colonisers is apparent; a dog-eat-dog world where you risked being prey as much as predator, and you might be both at different points in your career. Sea voyages were at the mercy of the weather to an extent it's easy to forget, and could take a vastly long time if the conditions weren't right. In the great storm that afflicts Crusoe's first voyage, the cargo ship takes 6 days from Hull to Yarmouth, then the crew wait another 7 days at Yarmouth to set sail again for London. (Hull to Tilbury - a major docks for London - is about 200 miles on modern roads.) Shipwreck or, on the open sea, capture by pirates, was a real risk, as he finds. And with the long distances, slow travel, absence of telecommunications and relatively small numbers involved, there was no-one in space to hear you scream - nor, usually, to come along in a few hours, days or even weeks to help. At the same time, the seventeenth-century Europeans were already a menace to many other peoples because they had guns - even if they, compared with 19th-century imperialists, felt in greater danger, and less secure in their numbers, firepower and attitude (an attitude partly moulded by this novel). They were also a menace to wildlife, as is clear not just when Crusoe is on the island, but when he washes up on the West African coast after escaping from slavery and kills lions - once evidently in self-defence, but on another occasion more to be on the safe side. At least twice, on both sides of the Atlantic, he speculates that his might have been the first gun heard in his current location in the entire history of the world. It was a moment which I could on one hand understand as feeling historically epic, probably a source of pride and excitement to thousands of 19th century readers, but which also pissed me off a great deal, wishing it (the real-life equivalent) had never happened and that explorers had been content with staying nearer home, or at least disturbing things as little as possible.

I like my own space more and more, yet never thought I would connect quite so much with Robinson Crusoe's time alone on the island. For one thing, it's very hot in the Caribbean, and I wilt uselessly in weather approaching 25C. But immediately, I did connect, especially with the Heath-Robinson ways he had to devise to do everything on his own from scratch. For me it was analogous to experiences stretching from hefting improbably large Ikea items home on buses as a recent graduate and building them on my own, to, in more recent times, adapting common tasks around illness and disability. (And if I didn't have that to deal with, I'd want to do historical reconstruction, so I loved hearing about old methods.) The narrative spoke of detailed inner experience while doing practical work, in a way you rarely see in novels. And, forced to live in an unusual amount of solitude, to an extent he wouldn't otherwise have chosen, Crusoe discovers its unexpected advantages. It is quite useful for getting over traumas (his own enslavement, storms at sea) - but it's not entirely curative (cf. how bloody terrified, retraumatised, he is when his cautious circumnavigation of the island nearly goes wrong, so he won't dare attempt it again). It's great for contemplation and thinking; you come to understand why hermits and traditional yogis were solitary (and that removing many everyday annoyances from their lives could be viewed as a cheat or fast-track towards becoming more peaceful). Crusoe's years of thinking-time help him make sense of his life in a therapeutic manner, though of course his interpretation is primarily religious, not based on modern Western psychology. He has a Bible (but no Shakespeare) and not long after being washed up, he begins a Christian conversion, having formerly shunned religion. Whilst I found his island years a very convincing portrait of someone forced to spend a lot of time alone, making the best of it, and sometimes thriving on it, he doesn't talk of survivor's guilt to the extent that disaster-survivors tend to in contemporary interviews. Whether this can be ascribed to religiosity, or the uneven quality of Defoe's novel, it's hard to say.

His fortitude and approach to tasks is impressive and, along with the religious content, forms another self-help facet of the novel. He persists in projects (such as building things) which take months, and most salutary of all is his learning skills that take a long time to get right (weeks or months, occasionally years), and which he could have scraped by without, making innumerable failed attempts before things start to work. Spending an inordinate amount of time alone can be a great way to shake off ideas of others' expectations, fashion etc, in a way that seems to take some people decades otherwise, and it would have helped knowing he had no-one looking over his shoulder at what a mess it was, or telling him to hurry up. But as someone who was always easily bored by things that weren't either absolutely necessary or which didn't come naturally (and was never trained out of it as a kid), I found the sheer detail of this persistence vividly interesting. It was the closest I'd come to experiencing it, and it seems to have lodged in my mind almost like a lived experience, or at least a 'how to' video. I can well understand how Robinson Crusoe became as much self-help manual as adventure novel, and was once a favourite of millions because it combined the two.

Crusoe obviously was from - and the novel helped reproduce - a very hierarchical society. But, after years of doing just about everything yourself, you also just wish that someone else would bloody do stuff for you. I can't see it as *only* hierarchy that makes him want a servant at least as much as a companion. You want a rest from doing everything yourself, and (as is often said of middle-aged and older people who've lived alone a long time) you get very used to your own space and very set in your ways: you want things done the right way.

Regardless, the portrayal of Friday is still shocking, because, in contrast to Crusoe himself, he has so little character development. For Crusoe, Defoe creates believable thought patterns in response to extreme experiences - he can obviously write an interesting character - but he simply does not show Friday as a full and rounded personality with interiority. Friday is good at everything he does, but he's just a role, and often a stereotype, not a person as is Crusoe. An SF Crusoe could have a robot turn up to fill the Friday role, and it would be a fair reflection of the original.

On Crusoe's return to Europe, the two of them feature in another mini adventure I'd never read of before - though it's absolutely ripping and was perhaps my favourite part of the book. Taking a chance in crossing the Pyrenees in deep winter snow with a small party of other men, they are surrounded by literally hundreds of wolves. As a cold-weather adventure, deeply primal, also echoing (and perhaps inspiring) a favourite book from my childhood, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, this pressed all the right buttons and had me riveted as I had been with no other episode in the novel. And as I was unfamiliar with the story, and this near the end, it carried a genuine sense of peril as none of the rest of the novel had. I'd been angry about Crusoe shooting the lions, yet as I read this I could imagine nothing more thrilling than to travel back in time as a healthy man and live these scenes. Real action-movie stuff.

I'm glad to have finally found out what's in the original Robinson Crusoe: often better, but sometimes worse, than expected.

(Read Sept-Oct; reviewed Nov 2019)

Step right up folks and see the English-speaking world's first published novel! Nevermind that it's a bit crap and a bunch racist, it was first!

Mostly read these days as a historical oddity, if nothing else Robinson Crusoe is a reminder of how far we've come, writing-wise, as a culture. I'd give it 2 stars, maybe 2 and a half on a generous day.

This is a good tool for building discipline and patience, because if you can sit still a while and follow along R.C. will just out of nowhere hit you with some Enlightened-level comment that cuts to the core and makes you rethink your whole being, or at least your present circumstances. But then he goes right back to listing how many goatskins he cured in the sun or how long it took him to whittle a canoe out of an entire tree or whatever. So because the content isn't always what we'd call finger-quotes arresting, the goal for me became to experience reading this as an action itself and seek the value in a bit of basic reflection, i.e. how's my posture right now? what's different about reading out in the sun vs. under the covers? have I become distracted? what's the last thing I remember before my mind began wandering? It was like reading as meditation, in that way.

So, did I like the book? Nope. But I don't like exercising either, and there's a similar sense of accomplishment in both activities.

Around the year 1704, Alexander Selkirk, a 28 years old Scottish privateer was marooned, at his request, on a desert island off the coast of Chile. He managed to survive there for about five years until he was rescued and brought back to England. The young man died a few years later on a voyage to Africa, but his story as a castaway became a legend. At the time of Selkirk’s death, Daniel Defoe, an English businessman and journalist, had just published a book inspired by his adventure, taking some liberties, particularly with the setting and timing: Robinson’s ship runs aground off the coasts of Brazil, and he survives there for some thirty years, no less!

Supposedly, Robinson Crusoe is one of the first modern novels written in English. To be sure, this book soon became a significant landmark in English literature, translated into almost as many languages as the Harry Potter series. It’s also considered a classic adventure tale for young readers; a claim that isn’t completely clear to me, given the archaisms and relative difficulty of the text itself.

The story is told in the form of a journal, but with considerable after-the-fact knowledge of the events and with many tangents along the way. The first few (the Salee pirates) and last few chapters (the crossing of the Pyrenees) are a bit off-topic. I was especially struck by the sheer amount of religious considerations, to the point that this book most strongly reminded me of Saint Augustine’s Confessions: in Robinson, as in Augustine’s book, a mature gentleman recalls his youthful mistakes and, as a new prodigal son, expresses his gratitude toward God for eventually redeeming him.

In the meantime, of course, we are instructed in all the uneventful particulars of the protagonist’s existence on the island: how he managed to build himself a shelter, how he learned to grow crop and make his bread, how he used his gun for hunting and later implemented livestock farming around his “castle”… In short, how, through intelligence and industry, 18th-century Europeans could truly become “comme maîtres et possesseurs de la nature.” (Descartes, Discourse on Method). When Robinson finally meets Friday, the noble savage, he also realises that, although casual cannibals are an abomination before the Lord, a man in the state of nature is genuinely good and has an innate intuition of Christian theology. In that sense, Defoe’s book is a harbinger of 18th and 19th-century Western imperialism, and truly epitomises the optimistic views of the Enlightenment.

Edit: In hindsight, there are three particularly memorable moments in Robinson’s adventure that come back to mind and are, each time, a bewildering epiphany to the protagonist and the reader: the discovery of the corn sprouts rescued from the shipwreck, which will allow the hero to survive; the finding of the first human footprint on the sand, after many years of solitude; the sickening revelation of the mass grave, just after the landing of the cannibals, which leads to the adventurous epilogue of the novel.

If Robinson is at the same time a new Adam, a new Ulysses, a new Sindbad or even a modern Prospero, it is practically impossible to make a list of all the later works that were directly or indirectly influenced by Dafoe’s novel: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Edgar Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Robert Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, H. G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau, Michel Tournier's Friday, or, The Other Island, J. M. G. Le Clézio’s Le chercheur d'or, Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Andy Weir's The Martian, RKO’s King Kong, Tom Hanks’ Cast Away, J. J. Abrams’ Lost, just to name a few. Indeed, Robinson, on his own, has been fruitful and has multiplied!

Lieber Robinson,

ich verlasse dich. Und ich werde höchstwahrscheinlich nie zurückkehren. Ich habe ja keinen „Fluch der Karibik“ erwartet, aber dein Leben ist einfach nur stinklangweilig, auch wenn du der Meinung bist, dass jedes kleine Detail desselben festgehalten werden soll. Und seien wir ehrlich, Frauen spielen in deinem Leben eh keine Rolle. Hast du nie geliebt oder zumindest begehrt? Natürlich nicht, du bist ja durch und durch das Ergebnis deiner puritanischen Erziehung. Und der Kolonialismus steckt dir ebenfalls in den Knochen. Da triffst du nach Jahren auf einen anderen Menschen und statt ihn zu fragen wie er heißt, bestimmst du seinen Namen. Statt seine Sprache zu erlernen, zwingst du ihm deine auf. Das war ja fast schon absehbar, als du dem Papageien eins über die Rübe gegeben hast und dich dann gewundert hast, dass er dir Jahre lang nicht nach dem Mund reden wollte.
Nein, ich kann dir nicht über 400 Seiten eine Gefährtin sein, begnüge dich mit dem armen Freitag.

Nur weil ich weiß, dass deine Geschichte viele Menschen inspirierte, und weil ein toller Verlag deiner Geschichte so ein wunderschönes Format verlieh, wirst du den Weg in mein Bücherregal finden. Verstaube in Frieden!

Creo que este gran clásico de la literatura universal se puede resumir en una palabra: resiliencia.

"La resiliencia o entereza es la capacidad para adaptarse a las situaciones adversas con resultados positivos" reza la definición de este palabro tan de moda en nuestros días.
El náufrago más conocido de la historia, nuestro Robinson Crusoé, supera toda una serie de dificultades haciendo que el lector participe de la experiencia vital de la mayor de las soledades.

Cuando a uno le hacen la típica pregunta de: ¿y tú qué llevarías a una isla desierta? Antes de responder yo recomendaría atender las reflexiones de Robinson, quien pasa por todas las etapas adaptativas en una situación tan devastadora y adversa.

Como lectores, vemos cómo se sobrepone a la ardua tarea del acopio de materiales, cómo se hace agricultor, cómo domestica los animales, como construye su casa y crea un hogar, cómo se refugia en Dios, cómo ansía la libertad a la par que teme salir de sus dominios... Una vez que aparecen otras personas, se le plantean dualidades ético-morales... La novela, más que ser de aventuras, es un diálogo interior donde el autocuidado y la constancia priman por encima de todas las cosas.

Y si yo tuviera que llevar algo a una isla desierta, sería el tenor y la constancia de este personaje para no abandonarse a sí mismo.

I don't have much to add to the never ending discussion of this book.

To me, the part that stands out the most is when he finds the ship, with the whole crew drowned in less than a foot of water. That's real horror.

Reading Robinson Crusoe is like reading a grocery list scribbled in the margins of a postcard from Fiji: "Weather's fine! Wish you could be here! Need fruit, veg, meat..."

اولین رمانی که خوندم این رمان بود. کلاس پنجم دبستان، درست در روزهای پیش از برگزاری آزمون مدارس راهنمایی نمونه. سرِ خوندن این کتاب و کتاب دور دنیا در هشتاد روز، راهنمایی نمونه قبول نشدم. اتفاقی که بعدها در مراحل بعدی زندگیم چند بار دیگه هم تکرار شد.

Best book I read in March 2021

“Nací en el año de 1632 en la ciudad de York, en una buena familia aunque no originaria del país, pues mi padre era un extranjero de Bremen que se había instalado en Hull.”
Así da inicio Robinson Crusoe y así termino una de las mejores experiencias lectoras que he tenido en mucho tiempo.

Creo que todo el mundo conoce la historia de Robinson Crusoe, el náufrago más famoso de la literatura, haya o no haya leído la obra, y es que se me hace muy curioso que cuando salió publicada por primera vez, en el año de 1719, esta incluía un subtítulo muy largo, casi como un párrafo mediano, donde revelaba la trama, puntos claves de la historia y algunos momentos emotivos que suceden a lo largo de la misma.

Lo anterior me hace pensar que lo que importa en esta obra —una obra maestra está de más añadir— es el ‘cómo’ lo cuenta Daniel Defoe, antes del ‘qué’ es lo que cuenta. En otras palabras, la narrativa y el sinnúmero de reflexiones y monólogos que uno se puede encontrar en este libro si bien no opaca a la trama, sí llega a sobresalir y a ser de los puntos fuertes de la misma; además, ha superado con creces las expectativas que en un principio me había planteado encontrar mientras la leía.

Esta novela lo tiene todo: un buen argumento, un buen estilo narrativo, unos personajes tan bien construidos y únicos, en especial y claro está: Robinson Crusoe y Viernes, y un final redondo, que por cierto, aún no puedo superar. En resumen, una extraordinaria lectura.

P.S. Debo hacer una mención honorífica a esta edición que leí de la editorial Sexto Piso, ya que para mi sorpresa, contiene más de 50 ilustraciones (no pensé que serían tantas) ubicadas al final del libro, como si se tratara de un registro de viajes o exploración, además de una traducción actualizada que considero está bastante bien.
La recomiendo mucho por si se animan con ella.