Back when this blog was just getting off the ground, the books in my backlog fell into a few interesting categories. One was "children's books" - young adult fiction if you're feeling generous - and another was nineteenth century literature. I struggled mightily with both of these genres. Reading chapter books written for fifth graders felt, understandably, like a waste of my time and effort. And on the other front, I quickly became painfully aware of how primitive the storytelling English language was and how bizarre sentence structure could be back in the 1800s.
This, of course, is a classic children's book from 1812 - a novel belonging to the rare intersection of those two troublesome categories. It wasn't terrible! It just also wasn't very good.
This is the type of book that's a classic not because it's any good, but because it's emblematic of a particular genre - in this case the "new society on an uninhabited island" genre. The titular family - mother, father, and four sons - get shipwrecked off the coast of what turns out to be a sprawling and impossibly biodiverse island. The rest of the book - 350 pages or so - just recounts their various adventures and anecdotes.
In a way, the book reads like an episodic television show. There's no deeper plot or story building up throughout the chapters; nothing interesting happens within the family dynamic, even across ten years, as four boys become four teens and young adults. Granted, this was always a book intended for a young audience, so I wasn't really expecting a story with any depth of thematic flow. There's no three-act structure here. It's just several dozen chapters of, "and then one day, Fritz came upon a kangaroo - isn't that something?" No one can blame me for skimming huge chunks of this.
Back to that biodiversity comment - seriously, there are kangaroos and buffalo and ostriches and lions and monkeys on this island. And there's also an impossible array of farmable plants. It's almost like the Robinsons just rolled their boat right into a meticulously set up wildlife sanctuary. Hey, there's a fanfiction idea - The Swiss Family Robinson set in present times, but they're all on hidden cameras for an audience of millions back at home. It's like Survivor but also The Hunger Games. "Hey, Franz just found the apple orchard - release the wolves!"
Mostly, this was just boring. Low stakes, nothing interesting, no deeper exploration of the human psyche or what it means to be marooned on an island. Maybe kids found this shit wildly entertaining back in the 1800s - hell, maybe I'd have found it mildly entertaining as a child myself - but there's no denying that here and now, this was a dud.
One last semi-interesting note. No one has any idea what constitutes the "original" Swiss Family Robinson story. As soon as it was written, it was less than faithfully translated into a number of different European languages with all kinds of new additions, slight tweaks, and new changes. Since the book was nothing more than a series of encounters anyway, no one really cared that Wyss's original tale had been modified - to the point where subsequent editions released in German had adapted a number of these changes and additions. After all, who cares?
Oh, sorry, one last note, for real this time. I forgot to mention that the book ends not with a rescue, but with the Robinson family declining an opportunity to be rescued after living on the island for ten years. That's right; four dudes between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five would rather stay with their parents than ever have the opportunity to take wives, have children, or live with the luxuries and conveniences of modern society. Mama's boys - am I right?
This is the type of book that's a classic not because it's any good, but because it's emblematic of a particular genre - in this case the "new society on an uninhabited island" genre. The titular family - mother, father, and four sons - get shipwrecked off the coast of what turns out to be a sprawling and impossibly biodiverse island. The rest of the book - 350 pages or so - just recounts their various adventures and anecdotes.
In a way, the book reads like an episodic television show. There's no deeper plot or story building up throughout the chapters; nothing interesting happens within the family dynamic, even across ten years, as four boys become four teens and young adults. Granted, this was always a book intended for a young audience, so I wasn't really expecting a story with any depth of thematic flow. There's no three-act structure here. It's just several dozen chapters of, "and then one day, Fritz came upon a kangaroo - isn't that something?" No one can blame me for skimming huge chunks of this.
Back to that biodiversity comment - seriously, there are kangaroos and buffalo and ostriches and lions and monkeys on this island. And there's also an impossible array of farmable plants. It's almost like the Robinsons just rolled their boat right into a meticulously set up wildlife sanctuary. Hey, there's a fanfiction idea - The Swiss Family Robinson set in present times, but they're all on hidden cameras for an audience of millions back at home. It's like Survivor but also The Hunger Games. "Hey, Franz just found the apple orchard - release the wolves!"
Mostly, this was just boring. Low stakes, nothing interesting, no deeper exploration of the human psyche or what it means to be marooned on an island. Maybe kids found this shit wildly entertaining back in the 1800s - hell, maybe I'd have found it mildly entertaining as a child myself - but there's no denying that here and now, this was a dud.
One last semi-interesting note. No one has any idea what constitutes the "original" Swiss Family Robinson story. As soon as it was written, it was less than faithfully translated into a number of different European languages with all kinds of new additions, slight tweaks, and new changes. Since the book was nothing more than a series of encounters anyway, no one really cared that Wyss's original tale had been modified - to the point where subsequent editions released in German had adapted a number of these changes and additions. After all, who cares?
Oh, sorry, one last note, for real this time. I forgot to mention that the book ends not with a rescue, but with the Robinson family declining an opportunity to be rescued after living on the island for ten years. That's right; four dudes between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five would rather stay with their parents than ever have the opportunity to take wives, have children, or live with the luxuries and conveniences of modern society. Mama's boys - am I right?
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