Shiver me timbers! I've been saving this book for Fiji, and here I now am and what better place to read Treasure Island than on a island in the Pacific.

I am always moaning that classics are over descriptive and wordy, not this one, which was a bit of a shame as I was looking forward to being able to envision the island in my head but that wasn't the case. This is an action lead plot so the surroundings dont get a lot of air play at all.

I had no idea what this book was going to be like other than there would be treasure on a island and it wasnt what I was expecting at all, in my head it was going to be a bit Secret Seven but it was actually a bit more grown up than that.

A quick read at less than 200 pages which I found perfect for island reading.

Ahoy pirates!

"There's never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a'terward"
-- Long John Silver --

Long before there was a Captain Jack Sparrow, there was Long John Silver. In fact, Disney, the producer of Pirates of the Caribbean, did a movie remake of Treasure Island back in 1950. Some believe Disneyland's pirate ride, which opened in 1967, was modeled after the classic Robert Louis Stevenson novel.

We all know the story, or at least have heard the names. Vague memories from high school days gone by. The opening chapter is vivid in pirate lore. The bedraggled pirate, Billy Bones, checks into the seaside inn, Admiral Benbow, along with his pirate trunk. He drinks rum, sings "fifteen men on a dead man's chest" and befriends the son of the innkeeper, Jim Hawkins. He asks the young boy to let him know immediately if he spies a one-legged man. Soon after, a blind man enters the inn and gives the pirate a piece of paper with a black spot on it, and the pirate then promptly falls over dead. Jim soon discovers a treasure map hidden in the pirate's trunk. Thus begins the adventure to find the lost treasure of Captain Flint.

The main character, Long John Silver, is epic. He's the ultimate politician, as he tends to blow with the wind. One never knows who's side he's really on. He's a smooth operator. He'll save your neck one minute, and slice it the next. Like Johnny Depp's role in Pirates, Long John is indeed colorful. His parrot, Flint, sits on his shoulder and squawks "pieces of eight!". What can I say, you just gotta like my man, LJ!

I enjoyed this book much more than when I was required to read it in school years. The story is, well, ...classic. My only beef is that sometimes I'm not quite up to speed on my pirate lingo and that really slows me down. But, it truly is a must read.

This was a hoot to listen to as an audio book & very well narrated by Neil Hunt. This is the mother of every pirate story I've ever read or seen, I think. The language was incomprehensible at times, on purpose, as even Jim Hawkins wasn't sure he always got the right of it. If I ever hear "15 men on a dead man's chest" again, I'll scream.
;)

The characters were great, of course. Long John Silver is quite the rogue & Jim is the boy we all wish we were. Somehow our extraneous adventures never turned out half so well, unfortunately. Still, it was fun hoping.

I read this as a kid & it was great to go through it again after all these years. Definitely a classic.

Treasure Island is a treasure for the young… If it is read in one’s childhood, it is irresistible and with age its magic doesn’t wear out for me but now it shines differently…

Now, if I can’t get away nohow, and they tip me the black spot, mind you, it’s my old sea-chest they’re after; you get on a horse – you can, can’t you? Well, then, you get on a horse, and go to – well, yes, I will! – to that eternal doctor swab, and tell him to pipe all hands – magistrates and sich – and he’ll lay ‘em aboard at the Admiral Benbow – all old Flint’s crew, man and boy, all on ‘em that’s left. I was first mate, I was, old Flint’s first mate, and I’m the on’y one as knows the place. He gave it me at Savannah, when he lay a-dying, like as if I was to now, you see. But you won’t peach unless they get the black spot on me, or unless you see that Black Dog again or a seafaring man with one leg, Jim – him above all.”

It’s awesome! The great adventure lies ahead… Goose bumps are guaranteed…
Now I see a lot of irony in the tale and even a bit of mockery – a funny quirk with cheese belongs rather to a subtle ridicule than to the romantic treasure hunting…

At the foot of a pretty big pine and involved in a green creeper, which had even partly lifted some of the smaller bones, a human skeleton lay, with a few shreds of clothing, on the ground. I believe a chill struck for a moment to every heart.
“He was a seaman,” said George Merry, who, bolder than the rest, had gone up close and was examining the rags of clothing. “Leastways, this is good sea-cloth.”
“Aye, aye,” said Silver; “like enough; you wouldn’t look to find a bishop here, I reckon. But what sort of a way is that for bones to lie? ‘Tain’t in natur’.”
Indeed, on a second glance, it seemed impossible to fancy that the body was in a natural position. But for some disarray (the work, perhaps, of the birds that had fed upon him or of the slow-growing creeper that had gradually enveloped his remains) the man lay perfectly straight—his feet pointing in one direction, his hands, raised above his head like a diver’s, pointing directly in the opposite.
“I’ve taken a notion into my old numbskull,” observed Silver. “Here’s the compass; there’s the tip-top p’int o’ Skeleton Island, stickin’ out like a tooth. Just take a bearing, will you, along the line of them bones.”

At different ages we believe in different treasures and they keep luring us.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write essays on whether or not they deserve the label

Essay #32: Treasure Island (1883), by Robert Louis Stevenson

The story in a nutshell:
Inspired by a doodle from his step-son and originally written as a rainy-day family diversion, the slim 1883 children's book Treasure Island (originally published serially in 1881 and '82) was not only the first novel of sickly genre author Robert Louis Stevenson's short career, but eventually one of his most famous. Essentially the tale of young adventurer Jim Hawkins, the story opens with him as a dutiful mama's boy off the southwest coast of England, helping to run a family inn that sees little action because of being located much more inland than most of the other local sailor-oriented hotels. Ah, but this is exactly what brings the drunken, scary Billy Bones there, where it becomes quickly apparent that he is on the run and in semi-hiding from a whole crew of mysterious, nefarious characters; and when they finally show up after Bones' alcoholism-related death, the family realizes that they are in fact pirates, on the hunt for a treasure map that Bones stole from a recent mutinous voyage that went horribly, horribly wrong. This then convinces a group of local Victorian gentlemen and family friends to go after the treasure themselves, eventually buying a boat and hiring a local crew to take them to this far-off tropical island; but little do they realize that the sailors they've hired are none other than the surviving pirates of the former mutiny, led by the charismatic yet psychopathic one-legged "ship's cook" Long John Silver, who plan on turning on the ship's owners once actually reaching the island and retrieving the treasure they were forced to leave behind during their last voyage. The rest of the book, then, is essentially an adventure tale, full of all kinds of legitimate surprises that I won't spoil here; let's just say that a lot of swashbuckling takes place, that many details regarding ship-sailing are faithfully recorded, and that the day is eventually saved by our fast-thinking teenage hero Jim, no surprise at all for a book designed specifically to amuse fellow teenage boys.

The argument for it being a classic:
Well, to begin with, it's arguably the most famous pirate tale ever written, and in fact established for the first time many of the stereotypes now known within the genre, including one-legged buccaneers, treasure maps with a big 'X' on them, shoulder-sitting parrots squawking "Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!," and even the very idea of British pirates being associated with exotic tropical islands in the Caribbean, an association now so strong that it's almost impossible to separate the two; and of course it's also the novel that created the unforgettable Long John Silver, now a thoroughly ingrained part of our Western culture at large. Add to this that it's simply an incredibly thrilling tale (rumor has it that England's Prime Minister at the time stayed up until two in the morning to finish his first reading of it), that it still holds up surprisingly well even 126 years later, and that it's also of immense importance to fans of Stevenson, a prolific author whose genius is just now starting to be widely recognized, after being dismissed by the literary community for almost a century as a frivolous "kiddie writer;" and now add to all this that Treasure Island is a surprisingly sophisticated examination of the era's ethics and moral code as well, taking an unblinking look at the "Victorian Ideal" as manifested in different ways among the stuffy gentlemen "heroes" (unable to improvise in changing circumstances, much to their detriment), the anarchic pirate villains (who almost kill themselves off just on their own, through drunkenness, ignorance and jealousy), and the ruthless yet principled Silver who straddles both these extremes.

The argument against:
A weak one at best; like many of the genre prototypes of the late Victorian Age, one could argue that this is simply too flippant a tale to be considered a classic. But we already established a long time ago here at the CCLaP 100 that genre stories are indeed eligible for "classic" status in this series, making this argument inapplicable in our case.

My verdict:
Holy crap! What an incredible book! And what a refreshing change in this case to not have to add my usual caveat to statements like these regarding late Victorian genre experiments: "...you know, for a century-old children's story that's kind of outdated and that you need to take with a grain of salt." Because the fact is that Treasure Island to this day still reads as fresh and exciting as the day it came out, which is a real testament to the writing skills of Robert Louis Stevenson (who I was already a big fan of before this essay series even started, because of his superbly creepy and also surprisingly relevant Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde); what a shame that this illness-plagued author ended up dying at the age of 44 in the prime of his career, instead of surviving to pen the truly mindblowing mature works I'm convinced that he had been capable of. And it's exactly for the reasons that his fans bring up that this book remains such an amazing one, and how it is that it can still easily be read for pleasure instead of having to force one's way through for historical purposes; because it is indeed not only a thrilling adventure tale, not only written in a style that largely rejects the purplish finery of the Victorian Age in which it was created, but is also a deceptively complex look at the entire nature of "gentlemanness" that was so prevalent at the time, gently poking holes in the entire notion of what it means to be a Refined Citizen of the Empire, even while acknowledging that a complete disavowal of these gentlemanly standards is even worse. There's a very good reason that Long John Silver has endured so strongly in our collective imagination over the last century, when so many other fictional pirates have fallen by the wayside, because he turns out to be a surprisingly complicated character worth coming back to again and again, a vicious killer but with a consistent internal moral code worth perversely admiring; it's but one of many reasons that I confidently label this book a undeniable classic today, and highly recommend it to anyone on the search for the best of 19th-century literature.

Is it a classic? Absolutely

3.75

Un libro da leggere con gli occhi dei ragazzi, quei ragazzi che riescono ancora a sognare e a credere nel bene, pieni di voglia di fare e desiderosi d’avventura. È un libro di intrattenimento e di svago, un ottimo mezzo per staccare la spina e intraprendere un viaggio per mare.

Stevenson ha la rara capacità di riuscire a trasmettere la salinità del mare con due parole di descrizione, riesce al inquadrare un personaggio dandone una rappresentazione veloce, uno schizzo, che trasmette tutta la mentalità e l’aspetto fisico del figuro.
Narrare attraverso gli occhi di Jim permette all’autore di far immedesimare il proprio pubblico, quello dei ragazzi e dei “giovani dentro”, quello dei fautori di immaginari voli pindarici, con il ragazzo che lascia tutto per un’avventura. I personaggi che incontra sono iconici: c’è il vecchio barbuto che fugge dagli altri nascondendo un tesoro, c’è il capitano senza gamba, il pappagallo parlante, il “povero” spiaggiato. Insomma, un po’ di tutto. Lo stesso Stevenson ammette di aver preso spunto, magari inconsciamente, dalle letture da lui fatte. Ma quello che ci trasmette è, non una scopiazzatura, quanto una storia che trasuda voglia di avventura e gioventù.

Mi è piaciuta anche la nota alla fine del libro, in cui l’autore dà alcuni consigli a chi volesse intraprendere quel viaggio che è scrivere un romanzo. In questo spazio, infatti, Stevenson ci racconta il motivo per cui ha deciso di scrivere L’isola del tesoro. E ci rivela anche i suoi trucchi: partire da una mappa, per esempio. Ecco, questo dovrebbe dimostrare la genialità e la fantasia di questo autore, capace di scrivere un romanzo iconico partendo da una semplice mappa, per di più inventata.

Mi dicono che al mondo ci sono persone non attratte dalle mappe; mi riesce difficile crederlo.
Anche a me, Robert, anche a me.


Condivido ciò che dice Calvino e che riporta Domenico Scarpa nell’introduzione: l’autore italiano trova più bella di tutte la prima parte, quando l’avventura si prepara ma non è ancora incominciata. Non posso che essere d’accordo: ho amato la frenesia della preparazione della nave, della meraviglia di Jim davanti a tutto.

Benché avessi vissuto tutta la vita sulla costa, mi parve di non essermi mai avvicinato al mare prima di allora. Era nuovo anche l’odore del catrame e della salsedine. Vidi le più meravigliose polene che mai avessero solcato gli oceani; vidi molti vecchi marinai con gli anelli alle orecchie, i baffi arricciati, i codini incatramati e quella loro tipica andatura goffa e spavalda; non avrei provato beatitudine più grande se avessi veduto altrettanti re o arcivescovi.

Veramente ben fatta.

E poi le descrizioni dei luoghi, dell’isola in particolare. Indimenticabili.

... nonostante il sole splendesse luminoso e cocente, gli uccelli marini pescassero e stridessero intorno a noi, e si poteva quindi pensare che chiunque sarebbe stato contento di scendere a terra dopo tanto tempo in mare, io mi sentii mancare, e fin dalla prima occhiata odiai la sola idea dell’isola del tesoro.

Oppure

Non ho mai visto il mare calmo intorno all’isola del tesoro. Il sole poteva splendere alto, l’aria essere priva di alito di vento, la superficie liscia e azzurra, ma i cavalloni continuavano a rovesciarsi lungo l’intera costa esterna, rombando e rombando giorno e notte; e non credo vi sia un solo punto nell’isola dove non giunga il loro fragore.


L’isola del tesoro non è un romanzo da analizzare, è un romanzo da vivere e godersi, magari proprio vicino al mare, per sentire con tutti i sensi la storia che si sta leggendo.

Una bella lettura, che avrei apprezzato ancora di più se fossi stata una tredicenne: a quella età bevevo libri di avventura. Consigliato!

Ps: ho adorato gli scambi tra i “pirati”, il loro modo di creare insulti giusti per il loro campo, come “marinaio di acqua dolce”.

Libro letto per la Most-Read-Books Challenge