Treasure Island

Avventura, incoscienza e fortuna allo stato puro!

C'è molta azione, ma anche tanti dialoghi (molto british sia per l'ironia che per la formalità di alcuni personaggi), le descrizioni dei posti e delle atmosfere che si creano sono molto belle e dettagliate.

Interessante il minisaggio di Citati, tratto da Il male assoluto.

Review to follow.

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Първата ми книга за пирати!

The first time I read Treasure Island, I was 11 or 12, and although it is a challenge for a child whose literary excursions confining to the Famous Five, I loved every page. There is an adventure, violence (hilly), boats, good and bad guys, maps, treasure, and pirates! At that age, there is something profoundly evocative in words like a pirate, ambush, musket, and so forth, and I have remembered Jim's adventures with great pleasure over the years.
I decided to reread it in a fit of nostalgia, even though I was genuinely worried that I would enjoy it again. However, it is even better, as have all the elements I remembered from childhood. Still, now I can appreciate it on a different level and see that it is not all adventure on the high seas, and Treasure Island is a book with live and complex characters. Long John Silver continues the charismatic bandit I remember, and although he is a villain who cheats on Jim, we can not help liking him.
You might say that Treasure Island will not be accessible to toddlers today, but this book is immediately available to any child with imagination and attention for over 2 minutes. In the same way, grown children will also like it because they can revive their childhood a little.

Robert Louis Stevenson has become one of my favorite authors. The past few months I have reread "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and "Kidnapped". I read these as a kid (the Great Illustrated Classics versions to be exact). They were good then but even better now as an adult.

"Treasure Island" is a simple story and the plot is not complicated. The imagery, the dialogue, and the interaction of the characters make a classic story. The story moves quickly and there's never a dull moment. I would definitely recommend this one with his other works. Thanks!

There are a lot of Sea Stories out there, and this is one of the better-known, but it hardly outshines its genre. I found myself missing the humor and vivid characterization of Conrad, not to mention the insightful philosophical asides. I also found it somewhat lacking as an adventure story, as the plot was somewhat simplistic and contrived, following the empty avatar of a narrator through various vicarious thrills.

There's nothing wrong with an escapist yarn, but a good one keeps you riveted with twists and turns, alternating verisimilitude and the unlikely. It's not as if it's a problem of period, either, since The Three Musketeers is one of the most rollicking and engrossing adventure stories ever written.

One must take into consideration the fact that Treasure Island is one of those genre-defining works which has been rehashed and plundered by a thousand authors since, until it is ingrained in our culture as The representation of piratical life. Like Neuromancer, many of the tropes and plot points might seem unoriginal, but that's only because they have been copied so frequently that we are no longer capable of recognizing their origin.

Yet, this isn't the case for all genre-defining works. The Virginian still stands out when compared with any other Western and The Moonstone remains unique despite all the Mysteries that have dutifully followed it. The difference is the author's verve and style, because even if later authors can copy his ideas, copying his style will prove beyond their skill. An author who is good enough to recreate another author's style already has a unique voice of their own.

It's curious to compare this with Poe's sole outing in the novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which has the voice and unpredictability Treasure Island lacks, but doesn't provide the same lilting tone or straightforward plot, leaving each as interesting artifacts in the genre, even if neither can claim to be a complete vision.

But then, it is often incomplete visions that provide the greatest inspiration, since they illuminate flaws and pitfalls, providing an outline for later authors and a caution of what should be avoided. Few people have come away from a book they couldn't possibly outdo feeling inspired to create, whereas reading a flawed but entertaining book can be the perfect jolt to a prospective author. But then, a book that inspires other authors to write could hardly help being the influential anchor from which the rest of a genre depends, so such flaws end up serving a purpose, if inadvertently.

What drew me to this book, more than anything, is my desire to understand the unique literary mind of Mervyn Peake, one of the most powerful authors in the English language. Peake often invoked this as a favorite book, and produced a powerful series of illustrations for it. In these illustratios, one begins to see what Peake took away from Stevenson, as an author.

While this is, to some degree, a story about simple characters, particularly the narrator, it is also a very dark tale, particularly for a children's classic. The death and deceit of the tale come out in Peake's drawings, as does the grotequerie.

This darkness is undeniably there, but truthfully, I barely noted it until I looked at Peake's vision. To some degree, Sea Stories always bear this kind of horror, a world of conflict, the unforgiving sea, headhunting cannibals, and death a cheap thing. Poe and Conrad each outdo Stevenson in unsettlement, but in different ways.

Poe's tends to be more purely visual, as is always his obsession in writing. It is the languid, lingering description that Poe gives to the leering face of a gull-bitten corpse that drives home the darkness of this life.

Conrad, on the other hand, gives us horror in the eyes of his characters. He doesn't shy away from the pure physicality of the unpleasant world, but where it lingers is in the mind's eye; visions which can never be erased, which will forever taint our everyday actions.

But Stevenson gives us neither. His adventure tale holds plenty of fear, but when young Jim murders a pirate, gruesome as it is, it rarely lingers either as vignette or psychological crack. Of course, he had a different notion of the maturity of a ten-year-old than we do today, where childhood lasts into the twenties, but we don't get the psychological progression we expect from a man coming to terms with death.

These moments and reflections are not entirely absent, but they tend to get lost in the fleeting, episodic style of the story. But I'm glad for Treasure Island, if only because it inspired Peake to expand upon this tale of a precocious boy drawn inexorably into a dark world of grotesque characters in his unfinished magnum opus, the Gormenghast series.

Not my cup of rum! Phasenweise ganz nett zu lesen, aber ich bekam die Stimme von Captain Blaubär nicht aus dem Ohr, der elendlanges Seemannsgarn spann. Piratengeschichten sind nicht mein Ding. Die Buchillustrationen in der Ausgabe waren künsterlich fürchterlich und hinsichtlich der Gewaltdarstellung mir zu grausam. Nichts, was ich meinen Kindern vorgelesen hätte. Und da künftige Enkel auch davon verschont bleiben sollen, wandert das Buch wieder in den öffentlichen Bücherschrank, wo es auch herkam.