Reviews for The Strange Case of R. L. Stevenson

The average rating for The Strange Case of R. L. Stevenson based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-18 00:00:00 Jesse Turner There is an early renaissance work called The Decameron, by one Italian bloke named Boccaccio. The book is a thinly veiled excuse to collect a bunch of smutty stories under a thinly veiled excuse for a framing plot (ten young men and women escape to the hills outside plague-ridden Florence, and behave themselves with remarkable propriety while telling the dirtiest anecdotes over the fire). I had to read it in college. The concept of gathering anecdotes like this is one of those early european ideas (maybe harking back to Herotodus?) which I rather like; Cervantes did it, as did Chaucer, who probably borrowed from The Decameron, BUT I was not that impressed by The Decameron itself. As an anthropological collection of otherwise censored narrative, sure. As literature: eh. So I suppose I wasn't entirely predisposed to like Ten Days in the Hills, Jane Smiley's "re-visioning" of the 14th century Italian work. All the same, a certain charm and involvement overtook me, and I enjoyed it, maybe despite myself. The book is set in the Hills of LA, right at the onset of the war in Iraq, in (I think) March 2003. The participants are the friends, family, and other acquaintance of a semi-retired film-maker. And they tell a lot of stories. Most are not smutty. Instead, the author adds a bunch of sex between the characters. So the frame narrative is better contrived, and the stories are more interesting. Ultimately, I found the sex... well, gratuitous. The book is literature. It's not porn. You wouldn't read it for that, there's too much of stuff like people talking and doing other things. And in my opinion, the author's attempt at making a mature (I mean both about older people and less juvenile) take on sex doesn't really pan out. The focus on sex feels unwarranted, and drags the natural movement of the work out of proportion. For instance, there are several parent/child relationships. One of the key ones, a father-daughter relationship, gets almost no "air-time," so that the narrator's assertions that they are so close feels unwarranted. Generally speaking, every since college (where I both read a lot of medieval lit and Joyce's Ulysses), I've been fascinated by the premise of adapting earlier works. In this case, I'm not enthusiastic about the choice of adaptation, and even then I don't think that aspect was particularly successful. But the characters *are* interesting; their interactions and relations are also compelling. The dialog is remarkably flat and unnatural (this was accentuated by the fact that I listened to it as an audiobook), but if you can get past that, I think you'd ultimately get sucked into the lives and preoccupations of the characters in the book. So while I couldn't say the book was perfect, I can say you will probably enjoy it, and not regret having read it.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-21 00:00:00 Ben Bettridge My typical response to a Smiley novel: she cites ten or twelve other books that look even more interesting than whatever I'm reading of hers at the moment. This book (a modern-day Decamaron (sp)) has the reader eavesdropping on several Hollywood residents in a palatial house over the space of a week and a half, shortly after the outbreak of the Iraq war (in Boccachio's work, the characters are hiding out from the Black Plague). Smiley said in one interview or another that she was going for an eavesdropping effect: we watch the characters argue, think, feud, have sex and basically live lives like people do, and watch their private and public dramas unfold. To me, it was a harsh reminder of the perils of espionage: other people's lives are just as boring as mine, so why eavesdrop in the first place? The characters are rich and textured, and I couldn't help but get especially interested in the feud between Zoe, a hot-stuff Jamaican actress, and her daughter, and although the debates about the war's exegesis are perhaps dated, they should never be forgotten (hear me Tso? yeah, you better run). But it wasn't enough to add up to a satisfactory read on my part. All the talk about Taras Bulba, however, has me pawing the ground to get to the library and get a copy. It sounds like a Ukranian Braveheart.