"Selkirk insists that he is cast upon the island only by the catastrophe of my personality which is a sobering thing, even for a man used to being sober. And while the O'Hara of Mayakovsky is famously content to wait for the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern, Selkirk newly and utterly alone on a stony blemish in the ocean, 400 miles off the coast of Chile spends his first three days and nights on the island blind drunk on the cask of flip left behind with him as a courtesy from his erstwhile crewmates, raging at his fate."
"De Tores's first historical novel, Saltblood, dramatised the remarkable story of Mary Read, the real-life genderqueer buccaneer of piracy's so-called golden age. Intrepid and unabashedly romantic, the novel won the 2024 Wilbur Smith adventure writing prize. As a follow-up, Cast Away despite the obvious congruences of setting and theme is a more wistful prospect."
"It's still a historical maritime epic, but stripped of the genre's conventional ballast, entirely rooted in a single location and concerned far more with the internality of its protagonist than the externalities of salt-washed and sun-baked mise en scene. In the novel's opening pages, Selkirk, crawling out of his three-day bender on the Mas a Tierra strand, realises he is faced with a choice between hardscrabble survival and total oblivion: Here if"
A line from a poem becomes the voice of an 18th-century privateer stranded in the South Pacific. Selkirk claims he is cast upon the island by the catastrophe of his personality, contrasting with a poetic stance that waits for beauty and modernity to return. Instead of calm reflection, Selkirk spends his first days blind drunk on leftover flip, raging at his fate. The novel follows this uncanny transhistorical ventriloquism with a more wistful approach than a prior adventure story about Mary Read. The setting remains maritime and historical, but the narrative is rooted in one location and focuses on the protagonist’s internal experience rather than external spectacle. Selkirk awakens after his binge and faces a choice between survival and oblivion.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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