will read for food

It feels not so oddly appropriate to be reading Stevenson Under the Palm Trees by Alberto Manguel (Canongate, 2002) at the moment—it has been a hundred degrees in the shade for several days; so hot even the mosquitoes can’t be bothered to fly. The book is only a hundred pages long but it has seeped into my thoughts like the heat. This happens to me a lot when I read—my imagination will get caught by a scene or a phrase and I am there with the story for the rest of the book. Even if the story goes completely downhill from that moment, I won’t abandon the novel—I read on, waiting for the promise implied by that first feeling of excitement to be fulfilled. Here is the moment that caught me in this story:

“He remembered his first year in Samoa and the yard covered in fallen papayas – the bright yellow skin turning dark, the fruit opening its many folds and exposing its sensuous, fleshy inside, smelling of saliva – and how he and Fanny had turned away without saying a word, as if they had unwittingly come upon a private and lewd spectacle.”

I don’t think it was the background smell of the over-ripe bananas on my kitchen counter that made me stop at this passage and think “I’m going to like this book,” but I read it, and I knew I was there—there for the rest of the story, wherever it went.

This is a literary mystery—meaning there is a murder, but the resolution of the crime is secondary to the effect the act of violence has on the surrounding society and the characters in the novel—specifically, Stevenson, who is Robert Louis Stevenson, the author.

R.L. Stevenson is someone for whom I’ve always had a secret, guilty fondness; secret and guilty in the face of the scorn a very hoipolloi ex-boyfriend used to heap scorn upon me for my pedestrian tastes. (He was a fan of William Faulkner and William Burroughs and other such Williams).

Why did I fall into the novel so quickly, so completely? Partly because of the heat, no doubt. My brain felt as sluggish as the writer’s in the book, as susceptible to fantasms as Stevenson seems to be. (There is more than a hint of Jekyll and Hyde in the plot) But really, I think it’s because Alberto Manguel’s re-imagination of the author and his last days on a faraway, hot lush island is so vivid, it took me right back to the first time I ever read an R.L. Stevenson story—Treasure Island. This contemporary little novella managed to evoke an important readerly moment– I mark Treasure Island as the first book that ever scared me. It was Long John Silver that first taught me the villains of stories are usually more interesting that the heroes. Even now the refrain is echoing in my head with each description riotous color and fetid, intemperate scene in the book; a parrot’s voice screeching in the back of my mind “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”