Scarcely longer than a medium-length short story, Alberto Manguel's finely crafted novella
Stevenson Under the Palm Trees is the haunting tale of the final days of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, best known for his fantasy
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Wracked by consumption, Stevenson has come to the island of Samoa, bringing along his American wife, Fanny, his mother, and two stepchildren. While there, the writer meets a mysterious Reverend Baker, a fellow Scotsman, who may or may not be a projection of the puritanical, guilt-ridden aspect of Stevenson's own personality. After Baker's arrival, the natives, who had admired Stevenson and called him Tusitala, or "teller of tales," start changing their view of the author and blame him for various disasters, including the rape of a young native girl and a mysterious fire in the local saloon/brothel.
Long known for his imaginative criticism of fantastic writing in books like The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, Manguel conjures up the claustrophobic paradise of the South Seas in numerous well-turned phrases: "Here the heat ... makes sin burst like flowers from the mud" and "She compared ... the Samoan faces to inky roses." In a piece this short, every word counts, but the writing never feels dense or heavy. The result is a highly suggestive, psychological tale, exquisitely rendered. Like a tropical glade saturated with echoes, refracted sunlight, and deep shadows, Manguel's novella is rich and multi-faceted despite its brevity. --Mark Frutkin
This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
Jorge Luis Borges is alive and well, and living in, well, in Argentina. Sort of. That doesn’t sound right at all, does it? Well, that’s because I’m having a hard time articulating the way in which a Borgesian world-view is still part of contemporary literature, even though it may seem that much of world culture has assimilated and rendered indistinct his insights about the slipperiness of perception, the meaning of odds and ends, and the possibilities of finding the infinite in the imaginary.
That Borgesian tradition survives most clearly in two writers from Argentina, both of whom now make their home in France: Edgardo Cozarinsky and Albert Manguel. And beyond their common link with Argentina and France, Cozarinksy and Manguel are connected to each other, and also to Borges, in several important ways. They are both fascinated by the bits and pieces of everyday life, and they’re both comfortable with the ways that history and imagination intertwine and become inseparable. While Borges’s restlessness was intense but mostly confined to the winding corridors of his mind, both Manguel and Cozarinsky are more literal nomads, wandering freely all over the earth as a matter of course, because that’s just the way that engaged people live. That’s the way the characters in their new works live, anyway, and Manguel’s novella Stevenson Under the Palm Trees and Cozarinksy’s short-story collection La Fiancée d’Odessa are both very good introductions indeed to the works of these two children of JLB.
Manguel's Stevenson Under the Palm Trees centres on Robert Louis Stevenson as he withers away on Samoa; he is gripped with a longing that’s not quite homesickness, but the effects are similar. At one point, Manguel has him muse that “[t]he word ‘nostalgia’ (he remembered having read somewhere) had been invented in the seventeenth century by an Alsatian student in a medical thesis, to describe the malady that affected Swiss soldiers when far from their native mountains. For him it was the contrary: nostalgia was the pain of missing places that he had never seen before” (p38). Stevenson has lived his life through wandering, but the constant peregrinations had taken their toll. Indeed, earlier on in the work, Manguel writes that:
“During the long nights of his childhood, when, grasping for break and shaken by a hollow cough, he had sat up in his bed, with his nurse by his side, waiting for what they called the Night Hag to finish her ghastly business and go, he had told himself that if he ever had enough strength, he would use it to lead his body to the edge of any possible adventure; he would take to the road or the sea, he would set off like a new Ulysses in the bone of strange encounters but, above all, he would travel for the sake of the journey itself. He imagined his sick bed as a boat into which his nurse would help him every night, and then, when the lights went out, he would cast off into the blue darkness, breathing lightly. In this hope he had waited for morning.” (p34)
This linkage of the sick bed and the boat is as important as Cozarinsky’s connection of glass magic lantern plates and stories of Zion in the Argentine. These are images of gentle irony and sadness, images in which idealism is tender, as delicate as a butterfly’s wings, and already on the way to being impaired.
And like Cozarinsky’s focus on the family furniture businesses and the cathedral domes, Manguel concentrates his gaze on both global wandering-detachment from the particular-and tiny, local details. Indeed, this passage sounds a lot like Cozarinsky: “They crossed the market and entered a maze of wet streets, which reeked of cabbage and fish. Down a small cul-de-sac they reached a wooden gate, a pathway of raised floodstones and then a creaking door that set up a mob of invisible dogs barking. They climbed up two flights of rickety stairs and then stepped into a large unfurnished room, the entrance to which was protected by nothing more than a curtain of beads. Inside, a large woman was sitting on the floor, apparently feeding a group of children of various ages” (p57). The meaning here comes through the attention to small details, details rendered with a plainness that makes them seem ordinary but in a narrative context that is always making their deep foreign-ness seem vivid and often unsettling. This play between the ordinary and the unsettling, the sick-bed and Ulysses’s ship, endless fields and glass plates in prayer meetings, is what, for both Manguel and Cozarinsky, coalesces into the idea of cosmopolitanism.
What’s any of this got to do with Borges? Well, perhaps the relationship is more spiritual than literal, more about what Roland Barthes might call the grain of the voice than any shared subject matter. God knows this grain is tough to get at when one is working through the lens of translation, and these problems are compounded here: I approach Cozarinsky through a French translation of Spanish texts, Borges is known to most of Books in Canada’s readers through English translations of his Spanish texts, and while Manguel is writing in English, Stevenson Under the Palm Trees first appeared as Stevenson sous les palmiers, published again by Paris’ Actes Sud [“traduit de l’anglais (Canada) par Christian Le Boeuf”]. And yet, in the opening line of Borges’s ficcion “Tlön, Uqbar Orbis” we read: “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia” (“Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar”). That conjunction, phrased in terms of discovery, echoes throughout both Cozarinsky and Manguel. But in a way, these wondrously adventurous and internationalist writers constitute a redemption of Borges’s-charming, don’t get me wrong-dustiness. The 1967 edition of Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings (co-written with Margarita Guerro), an obvious influence on Manguel’s 1987 Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi) opens with the following: “As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.” I can see the kind of intellectual languor that Borges is evoking there, and it has its value. But Manguel and Cozarinsky have brought this sort of out-of-the-way erudition well out of the realm of the lazy. For them, this sort of pleasure it the most basic stuff of life.
Jerry White (Books in Canada)
This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
