AustLit

'In the remarks that preface his 2003 Nobel Lecture, entitled ‘He and His Man’ (worth watching on YouTube for the dry comedy of the delivery alone), J. M. Coetzee speaks of reading The Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe when he was ‘eight or nine’. Presumably this was an abridged children’s version of the kind many of us read at that age. He would not have been alone when he fell in love with this ‘desert island that became a kingdom’, or when Crusoe became ‘a figure in my imagination’. Less predictable, perhaps, was his bewilderment at the claim in his Children’s Encyclopaedia that the author of the book was someone called Daniel Defoe. ‘This made no sense,’ he continues, ‘because it said on the first page of Robinson Crusoe that Robinson Crusoe told the story himself.’(Introduction)'