The Deerslayer

By: James Fenimore Cooper

Narrated by: Raymond Todd

Length: 20 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

The Deerslayer is the first of the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. Here we meet Natty Bumppo as a young man living in upstate New York in the early 1740s. The action begins as Bumppo, called "Deerslayer", and his friend Hurry Harry approach Lake Glimmerglass, or Oswego, where the trapper Thomas Hutter lives with his daughters, the beautiful Judith and the feeble-minded Hetty. Hutter's floating log fort is attacked by Iroquois Indians, and the two frontiersmen join in the fight.

(P)2001 Blackstone Audiobooks

Interesting

The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper was written in 1841. I found the story interesting. The more formal writing typical of books written in the 1800s was fun to hear, but I discovered I kept wanting to push the story along as it seemed very slow. I thought it was a good idea to reread a classic and remember what the world was like at that time in America.

I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is twenty hours and fifteen minutes. Raymond Todd does a good job narrating the book.

excellent story; reading acceptable but not great

The first of the Leatherstocking tales, it captures the attention and imagination. Although the reader has a god voice, he seemed not to understand what he was reading many times and so puts the emphasis on the wrong words. This makes understanding and following the story difficult sometimes. The language is often archaic and even anachronistic; sometimes it seemed like bigger words were used when shorter ones would have done at least as well.
But in all, I thought it well worthwhile and it had many exciting episodes.

Excellent

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

If you like adventure, history and the English language you cannot help but enjoy this story. Cooper wrote this in the late 1840's, and as anyone can tell you the English language was quiet different, something I greatly enjoyed. This gives a correctness to his story that cannot be obtained by an modern author. As in his other works he had extensive knowledge of the area he was writing about, and the American tribes that inhabited those regions. As such he was able to paint a picture that was easy to see.

Any additional comments?

This is a slow book to start, but well worth reading if you enjoy adventure stories from the early years of the American Continent.

30 years in the making

I started reading this book back in April of 1990 while I was on the deployment with the U.S. Navy on the USS Eisenhower. Life got in the way and I picked it up and put it down a few times over the years. It wasn’t until about a month ago that I picked it back up, only this time through Audible to finally get it read. It was a long journey but in the end it was worth waiting for. So glad I finally finished reading this book. Now off to the next adventure hopefully not another 30 years in the making!

Excellent performance

This is a good portrayal of manliness as seen through the eyes of nineteenth-century Americans.

Happy to have read Deerslayer

Classic American story. The reader was very good. Interesting that when Deerslayer was written, 1841, there was awareness of the sad consequences of colonization on Native Americans. Cooper understood that the notion of White cultural superiority was a poor myth, that Spirituality is not unique to white Christians and that not all Christians follow the teachings of their bible. The writer dwells overlong on moralizing, hitting the reader repeatedly and at great length on the fact of cultural equivalency , that Europeans and Indians each have their respective ‘gifts’ that are suited to their respective circumstances. Cooper is unduly harsh in judging Judith, not granting her the possibility that her love for Deerslayer revealed her basic goodness. She deserved better.

A glimpse into the past

Listening, instead of reading permitted me to imagine more vividly what JFC intended to portray in this story. I would have struggled with the accents and pronunciations. The narrator did a fine job distinguishing between the characters.
I appreciated the historical context through the lens of his time and not our current pc. It’s no wonder The Deerslayer has remained a favorite.

A View to the Past

This is an incredibly insightful piece to the American Frontier. The language and style is very accurate, however, as a reader in 2021, this is very difficult story to sit through. At times it's too wordy, unnecessary descriptive and the action sequences become muddled and lost. I found myself becoming lost in boredom more often than anything else, and continually has to go back and re-read segments. Should have been a short story.

a book well worth listening to.

I really enjoyed this book, and the reader was easily understood. it was a book worth pondering.

A flawed classic that should not be forgotten

Though flawed, this is an interesting book that is very much worth reading. As we listen to the yarn unfold, it’s worth remembering that American literature was in its infancy when Cooper was writing, and this was particularly true of the American novel. Many of the narrative devices found here—the heavy reliance on dialogue, the cliffhanging plot twists, the vivid “local color” descriptive prose, the candid depiction of violence—became mainstays of American fiction.

“The Deerslayer” repeatedly addresses issues of race in ways that, while certainly reflective of values of 19th Century readers, seem bracingly blunt and honest. We’re so used to white writers being either tone-deaf or color-blind when it comes issues of race that it comes as something of a shock to hear a writer address the subject with a guileless directness.

Set as it is in the Adirondacks, “The Deerslayer” might be called an “Eastern” rather than a Western. Nevertheless, Cooper established many of the foundations for fiction about the West. Some of these conceits, such as Indians speaking in grunting monosyllables and calling whites “pale face,” may grate on contemporary sensibilities, but this is our country’s cultural legacy and it’s better to face it than avoid it.

Cooper was a curious writer. He had a knack for storytelling and a lively wit, but his notion of style was downright perverse. I’ll own that writing in Cooper’s time was more verbose and florid. That’s not what’s at issue here. Cooper’s penchant for elaborate, latinate phrases results in prose that sounds more like a legal contract than poetry. He would never refer to a hillside or an incline when he could employ “acclivity” instead. Notwithstanding his limited skills, Cooper enjoyed an enormous readership. Even so, by his death, more nimble and versatile writers like Mark Twain would rightly satirize his literary foibles.

It’s hard to know how to evaluate Raymond Todd’s performance of Cooper’s text. On the one hand, the writing never quite comes to life. Todd renders many of the white frontiersmen in a vaguely Irish brogue that, though not unpleasant, isn’t convincing. On the other hand, the somewhat forced delivery feels entirely appropriate to Cooper’s labored prose.