Matthew Pearl's new book, 'Save Our Souls', tells the true story of Captain Frederick Walker and his family, whose shipwreck in 1887 mirrors the fictional tale of the Swiss Family Robinson.
The name Swiss Family Robinson probably conjures something slightly different for each of us, depending on our age. It is an amalgamation of tales that evolved over time. An echo and a reimagining of Daniel Dafoe’s 1719 novel “Robinson Crusoe,” the first “Swiss Family Robinson” was published in 1812 by Johann David Wyss: a German “dramatization of how a husband and wife rear their children while stranded on a highly idealized desert island.
” Wyss and subsequent writers who told the fictional family’s story followed a type: the “Robinsonade” tale where our hero is stranded and has to learn a series of valuable lessons as well as how to survive. Writers after Wyss fleshed out the Swiss Family’s characters in greater detail, giving agency to each of them in subsequent publications of their story. And of course Disney took notice, making the 1960 film and adding the Swiss Family Treehouse attraction to Disneyland and Disney World, helping to firmly enshrine the Robinson myth in our consciousness. In his new book, “Save Our Souls: The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder,” Matthew Pearl tells the story of the only family known to have been shipwrecked together. Pearl unfolds this tale with suspense, opening at the moment of the family’s greatest peril, and then taking us back in time to just before they began their cursed journey. His telling is notable both for its uncanny parallels to the apocryphal Swiss Family Robinson story that predated it and because the real-life shipwreck of Dublin-born Captain Frederick Walker, his wife Elizabeth and their sons was more dire than Disney’s idyllic fantasy. Pearl renders clear connections to the fictional story while writing a real-life adventure full of deceit, villainy and murderous plotting. In 1887, the Walkers, their teenage sons, their family dog and a small crew set sail from Hong Kong to pursue a fortune in shark fishing and then wrecked their ship, the Wandering Minstrel, in a storm
TRUE CRIME SHIPWRECK SURVIVAL REAL-LIFE TALES HISTORY TRUE CRIME
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