Robinson Crusoe

I think this is worth reading as a cultural artifact. Crusoe careened around the Atlantic enslaving people, and was then terrified of how he might be treated if he fell into their hands; his profound religious awakening and intimate relationship with an indigenous person (whose name he never asks) did not lead to any change in his views; his highest achievement as a person once enslaved himself was to become the feudal lord of a colony half-populated by more kidnapped and enslaved people. Crusoe is just face-meltingly abhorrent, and by the end I'd convinced myself that it was a satire of the English mindset of the time... Maybe it wasn't then, but it is now.

I liked the parts about danger and setting up systems of food production, though.

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Restless Classics presents the Three-Hundredth Anniversary Edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic Caribbean adventure story and foundational English novel, with new illustrations by Eko and an introduction by Jamaica Kincaid that contextualizes the book for our globalized, postcolonial era.

Three centuries after Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, this gripping tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued, remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel.

But the book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about entrenched show more attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized that still resound today. As celebrated Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid writes in her bold new introduction, “The vivid, vibrant, subtle, important role of the tale of Robinson Crusoe, with his triumph of individual resilience and ingenuity wrapped up in his European, which is to say white, identity, has played in the long, uninterrupted literature of European conquest of the rest of the world must not be dismissed or ignored or silenced.”

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: You really don't need me to mention anything about Defoe or his writing. Or, if you do, go to gutenberg dot org and download a free ebook of the text. You need to read it. Go on! Scoot! Come back when you've downloaded the ugly version. Or, if you're really lazy, go read the Wikipedia article to find out what it's about, so you can look at these illos with a properly appreciative eye.

This gorgeously illustrated tricentennial edition is entirely meant to be celebratory not introductory. I mean, look!


What stunning artwork, no? Any of them, but most especially #2 and #4 above, would work as wall art for me.

This is an elegant, easily-shelvable edition that will give you an æsthetic thrill every time you look at it. Anyone who already loves this fantastical story would enjoy the look and feel of it. Anyone who enjoys pretty editions of books as shelf decor would like it too, though I admit I frown on buying books that sit in one spot their whole lives by design. SOMEONE ought to read it. That's what a book is for!

Still and all I do not run the world (terrible oversight on the goddesses' part) so you enjoy things your own way. O.o

As Yule comes screaming in blazing hot like the ball of destruction it is on one's budget, reasonably priced beautiful things like this are welcome gifts. Especially to yourself. show less

Classic novels sometimes have the occasional racist references and usually it doesn’t bother me too much. I take it with a grain of salt and try to remember that it was written during a different time period and reflects an earlier belief system. I still don’t like it, but there’s nothing we can do about it at this point and it’s usually a minor point in the book.

This one was different though. There’s something disturbing about the way Robinson mentions slavery so casually. He joins a ship on the condition that he’ll get a cut of the profits made from the slaves they transport. He also escapes being enslaved on an island with a young boy, only to sell the boy into slavery once they are rescued.

Robinson spends more than 20 show more years on an island by himself before interacting with another living soul, (it reminded me a lot of Cast Away, which I’m sure took huge inspiration from this novel). When he finally gains a companion, the infamous Friday, he decides to treat him as a slave instead of an equal. The first thing he teaches him is how to call him Master. He also decides to name him Friday instead of attempting to find out his actual name.

He continuously refers to Friday as an ignorant savage, all the while saying how he loves him dearly. When he discovers that Friday's people don't live too far away, his first concern is that Friday will forget that he is his slave and try to return to them. It's unbelievably selfish. Yes, Friday loves him and feels indebted to him, but I felt like Robinson took advantage of this in a horrible way.

Robinson’s devotion to God and regret for his past behavior seems to come and go with each mood. He swings from thanking God for providing food and shelter for him, to lamenting the fact that he could have been living on a huge slave plantation if his boat hadn’t been shipwrecked.

All of that being said; there are some things I liked about the book. Robinson is forced to get very creative to survive on the island and it’s interesting to see how he creates a new home for himself. Also, his solitude makes him reflective and he makes some wonderful observations as he examines his life.

In the end, I’m glad I read it, but I think Robinson is a self-centered jerkface.

A few great lines:

“That all the good things in the world are of no farther good to us than for our use. And that whatever we may heap up to give others we enjoy only as much as we can use and no more.”

Robinson felt this strongly after he killed more than he could eat or collected more wood than he needed. He watched it rot away when he didn’t use it and realized that it was useless to hoard extra food, etc. because it just went to waste.

"How frequently, in the course of our lives, the evil, which in itself we seek most to shun, and which, when we are fallen into is the most dreadful to us, is often times the very means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be raised again from the affliction we are fallen into."

"Thus fear of danger is 10,000 times more terrifying than danger itself when apparent to the eyes. And we find the burden of anxiety greater by much than the evil which we were anxious about." show less

This pillar of Western literature, considered by many to be the first English novel, left me ambivalent and uncomfortable. Its antiquated mores clash with modern perspective, but not just because of quaint antiquity: Defoe's Puritanical self-assuredness and cultural ignorance (resulting in subjugation) seem ominous in light of present-day conflicts.

Is it a fun read? Sure, most of the time. Defoe's meticulous discussions of castaway lifestyle are captivating, if telescoped (a few paragraphs often represent years of island isolation for Crusoe). But because this is a masterful work, and does carry with it a serious message, passages about literal survival are interrupted by multi-page religious epiphanies as Crusoe faces his eternal show more survival.

Crusoe's is a colonial white man's world. There is not a single real female character in the entire story. Anyone not European is a savage, meant for enslavement. Defoe's proud intolerance is not uncommon for the time, but paralleled with his relatively unsmiling Puritan tenets, it can feel downright grim. What is left unanswered for me is whether Defoe was aware of this hubris, whether it's a trick on the reader that Crusoe is so blithely superior, that I'm the fool for not understanding that he was winking the whole time. show less

I'm actually sorry I read this book. I always had good impressions of it, without ever having read it. Now I have, and there's no going back.

I'm not sure just how much the views of Robinson Crusoe reflect those of the general public at the time it was written, but I suspect they match fairly well. And Robinson Crusoe is a arrogant, racist, misogynist idiot.

Think I'm exaggerating? He makes it off the island, but leaves some 'Spaniards' stranded there. On the very last page of the book he sends 'five cows, three of them being big with calf, some sheep, and some hogs' back to the island for the inhabitants, along with 'seven women, being such as I found proper for service, or for wives to such as would take them.'

Early on in the book, he show more is taken by 'Moors' that force him into slavery. When he makes his mistake, he is careful to make sure he takes a fellow captive along to serve as his own slave boy.

The book is rife with stuff like that. When Crusoe rescues a Spanish castaway from cannibals he introduces himself, but when he rescues a native from the same fate, he tells the native his name will be Friday, and Friday is to call him 'Master.' Apparently Friday thinks that's perfect, and goes out of his way to become a perfect slave.

Hell, he ends up on the island as part of a failed attempt to become a Brazillian slave trader!

There's only two beings in the book who have a name - Robinson Crusoe, and Pol, the parrot. His wife and children get a lot less prose than the parrot, and no, you never learn their names either. Everyone else is described and never named, and they all think Crusoe can do no wrong. Apparently only Robinson Crusoe ever saw fit to criticize Robinson Crusoe.

The parts of the book I actually enjoyed were descriptions of how he performed all the tasks required to stay alive, and yet they were always ridiculously easy. Never once does he not find fresh water within minutes of looking for it, and although many things supposedly take months and months to complete, he only ever mentions the first couple of days of his labour at most. He never gets hurt, gets sick only once and shoots all sorts of people without ever getting so much as a scratch.

All of this mess is apparently because he wouldn't listen to his father and ran away. It's appropriate for God to kick him in the teeth repeatedly and kill off everyone around him over and over again until he gets the message. And even then the good Christian's morals wander around like a lifeboat in one of the many storms. About the only decision taken for Christian reasons that stuck was not moving back to Brazil because he wasn't sure about being Roman Catholic!

The best part of this book? The binding fell apart as I read it so it's not worth keeping or selling now I'm done with it.

Maybe I'm missing the point. If it's there, it's not worth digging for. If you haven't read this one, skip it and watch an episode of Gilligan's Island instead. show less

As a child I was introduced to the Ladybird version of the book, so was under the misapprehension that this was a children’s novel. It is not, as it deals with themes such as slavery, cannibalism, piracy and survival. The only other novel by Defoe I had read was Moll Flanders, so I probably should have realised this was not going to be a sanitised novel. In Wilkie Collins novel The Moonstone the old butler whenever he was troubled or needed guidance would seek it in the pages of Robinson Crusoe, rather like a moral oracle. I found this curious, surely for a good victorian the Bible would have been the book to turn to. Finally I now understand why, Crusoe is the story of a man who despite appalling circumstance never gives into despair show more and melancholy, while at the same time remaining resolutely human. Sometimes in novels these great hero’s feel out of reach, like they are set apart, but Crusoe demonstrates that as well as heroism there is also fear and cowardice, humanity and savage violence. While it is certainly a novel about surviving slavery and shipwreck, to leave it at that is to miss its depth, its message of hope that however bad our external circumstances may be we still have the power to make the best of them. show less

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has been called (by no less than James Joyce) the first English novel. I had the pleasure of reading the 300th Anniversary Edition from Restless Books. It opens with Jamaica Kincaid's "Introduction" which first quotes Joyce (who calls the character Robinson Crusoe the "true symbol of British conquest") and then continues as a satiric letter from Kincaid to Crusoe himself: "Dear Mr. Crusoe. Please stay home." The book lays bare 18th century British attitudes towards colonization; race; slavery; religion; and more, but there are also some subtleties and nuances one wouldn't expect. This edition also comes with a Chronology of Defoe's life, and wonderful black ink drawings (and an artist's statement) by Eko.