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MeIt’s hard to imagine much of a relationship between Frank O’Hara, the famous poet and art critic whose urbane voice is synonymous with 60s Manhattan, and Alexander Selkirk, the 1800s Scotsman whose rise on a small island in the South Pacific could inspire Daniel Defoe’s Robinson. However, ironically, it is a line from O’Hara’s poem Mayakovsky that Francesca de Tores recreates Selkirk’s mouth at the opening of her new book, Cast Away.
Selkirk insists that he was cast on the island “only by the misfortune of my character” – “which is a sad thing, even for a former alcoholic”. And although Mayakovsky’s O’Hara is happy to wait for “the misfortune of my personality / to look beautiful again, / is interesting, and modern”, Selkirk – alone on the “rock defect in the sea”, 400 kilometers from the coast of Chile – spends the first three days and three nights and a blind night on the island. from his old friends, angry at his fate. This act of transhistorical ventriloquism is an unexpected start to a strangely strange novel.
De Tores’ first historical novel, Saltblood, dramatized the remarkable story of Mary Read, a real-life figure in piracy’s golden age. Brave and unabashedly romantic, this book won the 2024 Wilbur Smith Prize for writing. As a follow-up, Cast Away – despite the obvious connection to the title – is a very interesting prospect. It’s still a classic nautical story, but it’s removed from the usual ballast of the genre, anchored in one place and more concerned with the inner content of its protagonist than the salt-washed exterior and sun-baked mise en scène.
In the opening pages of the novel, Selkirk, emerging from his three-day trek on Más a Tierra, realizes that he must choose between hardscrabble survival and total oblivion: “Here … to be the deadest of all.”
If you’re wondering how any author can mess up a book of over 300 pages on such a few things, the answer is soon apparent: compelling style. De Tores’s Selkirk is a fascinating antagonist whose company doesn’t wander as we follow him through his many days hunting and skinning goats, smoking, killing goats and – understandably – engaging in furious onanism.
“Here on this island, I who have nothing must be everything,” Selkirk declares: “I must be a cobbler, a tanner and a carpenter at the same time. The pictures where he scrapes leather and creates moonlight are so complete and well-researched that they can be used as guides – but somehow they are not boring. Gradually, a spiritual dimension enters Selkirk’s work: every day the island changes from a prison to a purgatory for The “unrestrained” Scot.
With only one Bible as his source of spiritual support, Selkirk first searches the scriptures for sources to add to his wank-a-thons (Song of Solomon and the Books of Ezekiel are particularly fruitful). But soon his mind changes drastically. He begins to divide the gospel into erased poems and submits to the empty beauty of the island, where hummingbirds run around his fire like “strange and sparkling machines of the sky”, and a group of migrating sea lions falls on the beach every year like “a flood of bodies”.
Undressed, Selkirk begins to judge himself “a strange creature, full of goat meat and metaphors”, and wonders how a person can continue to find himself “well”: “Any joy that I may have is always tainted by my sorrows and my sufferings; I am angry when I eat, and I am lonely even when I hurt myself, and in every way I know that I am living. if I try to comfort, that I will not die soon.
The rubric of the book does not hide the secret of Selkirk’s writings as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, and it is clear to the reader that he will be saved in the end. The argument about Cast Away lies mainly in Mr. De Tores’s decision to reject Selkirk’s full description of Más a Tierra – “the great tragedy of a life built by tragedy” – until the end of the novel. Piecemeal, we learn about the participation of Selkirk’s youth in the New Darien abortion project, the dangerous plan to establish a Scottish colony in present-day Panama, and his childhood in Scotland, tormented by the abuse of six older brothers on the one hand, and the “shameful love” of a closed mother while others dream (“and again).
Cast Away may begin as a straightforward seafaring story, but it ends up as a moving, sophisticated portrait of a modern man and more interesting – at least in De Tores’s words – than history would allow. The man is going to reveal himself “ungodly”.
