RE: Creciendo con El Lobo de Mar, de Jack London/ Growing up with The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London (ESP/ENG)

You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Creciendo con El Lobo de Mar, de Jack London/ Growing up with The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London (ESP/ENG)

View the full context

carolkean in Hive Book Club • 24 days ago

Oh my - I'm guessing your parents DID NOT READ this novel before gifting it to you!
I was just 12 years old, and it hit me like a freight train. My parents, familiar with some of the author’s more youth-oriented works, had no idea of the sheer intensity of the book they gifted me.

What a dark and nihilistic character, Wolf Larsen.
Intriguing.

“He was splendidly muscled, a heavy man, and though he strode with the certitude and directness of the physical man, there was nothing heavy about his stride. The jungle and the wilderness lurked in the uplift and downput of his feet. He was cat-footed, and lithe, and strong, always strong. I likened him to some great tiger, a beast of prowess and prey. He looked it, and the piercing glitter that arose at times in his eyes was the same piercing glitter I had observed in the eyes of caged leopards and other preying creatures of the wild.”
― Jack London, The Sea Wolf

"Life is cheap" - all those speeches!
“Do you know that the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course over-estimated, since it is a necessity prejudiced in its own favor. ...There is plenty more life demanding to be born. ...He was worth nothing to the world. The supply is too large.”

I read the book in college, and it was hard not to believe the cynical captain had cornered the truth.

The romance between the shipwrecked writer and the "little woman" almost ruined the novel for me.

But... Wolf Larsen!
What a brutal and fascinating man.

Thanks for an interesting book review!

24 days ago in Hive Book Club by carolkean

0.00 ARCHON

1 vote

Sort:

Trending

[-]

cumanauta 24 days ago (edited)

My parents only knew White Fang and The Call of the Wild, and from there they just assumed this was more of the same. The did not know better, and I never told them there was more to it than just an adventure book.

Now try to picture me, 12 years old, struggling with this passage:

"I believe life is like foam, like a ferment," he promptly replied. "A thing that has movement and can keep moving for a minute, an hour, a year or a hundred years, but in the end it will stop moving. The big one eats the small one to keep moving; the strong one eats the weak one to preserve its strength. The fortunate one eats the most and moves the longest, that’s all. What do you think of these things?"

Retrotranslation into English by myself, with all its likely problems and probable lack of similarity.

At that age, questioning the very value of life in such a way was indeed a bitter pill. But later, during adolescence, that bit would bloom into full blown cinicism that lasted quite a bit before fading away.

Thanks a lot for your words and fot stopping by my post.

0.00 ARCHON

1 vote

[-]

carolkean 24 days ago

LOVE IT
And that you read such classics at 12, and that you said nothing about the nature of this novel to your parents, who had no idea. :)

0.00 ARCHON