Monday, January 31, 2005

#3: Long John Silver -- Bjorn Larsson (trans. Tom Geddes)

Pirates, arrrrr! I've had this for ages and only just got around to reading it. The translation is excellent, e.g. unnoticeable, though I did wonder how the pirate-speak read in the original Swedish. This novel tells the story of Long John Silver in suitably swashbuckling prose, yet there's more depth to it than that: plenty of philosophising on the nature of freedom, the evils of slavery etc, without the author imposing a modern mindset upon his characters. Presents Silver as a real-life pirate and gives a very credible and witty explanation as to why he never made it into Captain Johnson's A History of the Pirates: excellent cameo appearance from Defoe, who discusses literature. Also plenty of rum, treasure, plundering and misbehaviour.

reposted here from LJ in order to keep all my reviews in one place

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