*Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe -Daniel Defoe
Battling between the strictures. What I liked best. What an enjoyable read. How pleased I am to have read this book. I can clearly see how Melville must have enjoyed this as well, not only because he and Defoe haunted the same obsessive sea drama, but in their freedom of story-telling. Lists, repetition, continually reminding the reader of what has happened, and then, of course, the singularity, or linearity of the telling. Though Melville was able to shift perspectives, and Defoe was not, they both kept the reader so focused on one action at a time, to the “minutest detail”, as if we were pancaked against a door watching the novel through our peepholes, and what falls down our hallway, pirates, parrots, misadventure, cannibals, whales, shipwrecks, et cetera, that we never tire of our singular view. I still am a little baffled that the book didn’t end when Robinson got off the island, and continued on for a fifteen page adventure in the snowy mountains of France fighting giant packs of wolves. But, so I read it. As I resolve myself to read this year the best books in the world, I’m happy and fortunate to have commenced with such a classic.
“… that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction.”
We cannot forget the line drawing of Defoe that is on the first page of the Signet Classic, a snub-nose wicker face man with a voluptuous, curly wig… “and the desires were so moved by it that when I spoke the words my hands would clinch together and my fingers press the palms of my hands, that if I had had any soft thing in my hand, it would have crushed it involuntarily…”
and the conclusion of the novel,
“I might well say now, indeed, that the latter end of Job was better than the beginning.”