Brandon Oswald

Rare is it to find a printed edition of the legendary Robert Dean Frisbie's works about the South Seas, although Project Gutenberg Australia has The Island of Desire and My Tahiti available for free download as ebooks. Rarer still is it to find a work devoted to the study of Frisbie's life in the South Seas. Brandon Oswald has given us such a work with Mr. Moonlight of the South Seas. It's not an academic biography. But it is a sympathetic portrayal of one of the lesser known writers in the South Seas literary genre. And it's something else, too. For Oswald has turned this brief, well written description of Frisbie's adventures into something of a personal journey as well. That is what makes it so interesting to me. Where possible, he has followed in Frisbie's footsteps. Elsewhere, he has approximated in his own life in the Cook Islands spiritual visits of a sort that recreate many of the locales, vistas, and even feelings that Frisbie himself encountered 50 to 80 years earlier. I enjoyed this book. And I'm a bit envious of Oswald's opportunity to track down Frisbie's documents and meet with his family.

Regarding the content, although the book is brief, it is full of detail. Much of its was entirely new to me. Oswald has conducted original research, here, as well as assembling appropriate commentary from Frisbie's friends and family, most notably the correspondence Frisbie maintained with the novelist James Norman Hall.

A couple of realizations emerge from reading about Frisbie's life. He was a fantasist and dreamer. And while he tried to fuse a certain romance into his own writing, sometimes successfully, other times not, it was, ironically, as a realistic chronicler of Polynesian life and customs where he was at his most powerful. Second, Frisbie's relatively early death at age 52 in 1948 may have had a poetic appropriateness. It is hard to imagine Frisbie at home in the world of the 1950s and 1960s, the modern world that would eventually make inroads into his beloved Puka-Puka island. In many ways, Frisbie was a man of the nineteenth century. He barely tolerated the twentieth. As Oswald relates, even Jack Benny on the radio was intolerable to Frisbie.

The great South Seas novelists from Frisbie's era are long gone, now. James Michener was the "newcomer" who himself passed away in 1997. But both Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall died within a few years around the time of Frisbie's death--Nordhoff in 1947 and Hall in 1951. And, today, even the generation that has firsthand memories of that earlier generation is passing from the scene. And that is why we are lucky to have Oswald's book, which gained much from his friendship with Frisbie's daughter, Johnny. This is an insightful and at times moving biography that merits a wide readership. Well done, Brandon Oswald.… (lisätietoja)