An odd little novella about Robert Louis Stevenson; this edition is lushly produced with posh covers and illustrated with some of Stevenson's own woodcuts (at 105 pages of big text it needs to justify its price tag!).

It's a story based on Stevenson's last days in Samoa as he is dying of tuberculosis. After his meeting with a newly arrived Scottish missionary, bad things start to happen and Stevenson is drawn into the events in a way such that in his ill state he can't be sure what's happening.

A powerful and slightly strange little story that echoes RLS's own work in his desire for his fiction to convey purely actions and dialogue - 'War on the adjective' and Death to the optic nerve' as he wrote to Henry James, a real correspondance that Manguel quotes. Interesting but I would have preferred a longer novel or collection of stories. ( )

I'm not really a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson. I read his "Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde" once and, though I liked the theme, I didn't really enjoy reading it.

I like stories about authors, though, so when I saw this and the blurb at the back that said "ghost story" I was hooked. Stevenson Under The Palm Trees revolves around RLS's last days in Samoa where he has become a local celebrity and is given the nickname "Tusitala" ("Teller of stories"). The first few pages feel a like dropping into a dense jungle -- Manguel's prose is lush and evocative, reminding me a little of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea .

Stevenson eventually meets Mr. Baker, a missionary who looks like him, or a shadow of himself. That the story would eventually be about the duality of man similar to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is almost a given and that spoils it a little for me. Strangely, as the story progresses Manguel's prose also shifts from lyrical to sparse and I similarly felt as if I was moving from the vibrant colors and beauty of the world outside to the shadowy darkness within. While interesting, I still found the later part of the book tiring. It was trying to impress a lot on me on such a limited amount of pages. Had it been longer, it might have worked.

Nevertheless, I love the idea of writing a fictional tale about a real author and Manguel succeeds in cleverly incorporating facts and letters about RLS's last days into a fictional tale that resembles a real story written by RLS.

The book also features Stevenson's own woodcuts, which he did for another book. ( )