The nineteenth century, with its clear awakening to modernity in the technological, scientific and industrial, offered an unparalleled opportunity for the conquest of a world that still maintained certain spaces given to obscurantism, to the esoteric...
And in that area of ​​chiaroscuro, literature found a fascinating setting for storytellers of great adventures like Julio Verne or own Robert Louis Stevenson. Between them they occupied the highest narrative levels in a reading world eager for adventures in which modern man faced the still unknown. Verne's great inventions and scientific assumptions were combined with Stevenson's logs of magnificent adventures, a fundamental tandem to approach this era from the more human perspective with which literature always carries.
Due to his personal health circumstances, Stevenson ended up becoming a traveled guy who precisely gave himself up to the literary mission of travel literature, with that addition of fiction that ended up taking him to the top of the adventure genre.
In his 44 years of life, Stevenson wrote dozens and dozens of books, many of them surviving to this day in reinterpretations for the big screen, for the theater or even for television series.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Robert Louis Stevenson
The island of the treasure
There are books that you can always recommend to any type of reader, from the most experienced to those looking for a good book with which to start to get into the healthy habit of reading. With this novel was born the literary paradigm of the hidden treasure to which pirates entrust their entire destiny.
The symbol has survived to this day as a true vital foundation of all ambition. If José de Espronceda's Canción del Pirata contributed the lyrics of the pirate spirit, La Isla del Tesoro rounds off the concept, the symbol of freedom sailing the seas in search of any treasure that justifies adventure and risk.
The characters of Admiral Benbow with their great secret, the trip aboard the Hispaniola and the adventures of Jim Hawkins, young and intrepid accompanied by Dr. Livesey. The stellar appearance of John Silver, crouched among the crew, ready to assault the boat at the best moment ...
And the treasure, waiting on a remote island not yet mapped by the experts of the time. One of the greatest adventures that reads quickly, but full of brilliant descriptive details.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
There are novels that in their fantastic character carry an implicit charge that ends up addressing very real aspects. A basic reading of this novel offers us a singular enjoyment close to the crime novel, something like the Dorian Gray of Oscar Wilde (considering that Oscar Wilde's great work was published a year later, it may have served as inspiration)
But as soon as we begin to analyze what that duality means, that personality that unfolds and ends up being an antagonistic reflection of the main protagonist, we also understand an intention to wake up to the fact of the contradictory human nature, capable of accommodating to the circumstances, skipping all those supposed unbreakable moral norms in an ideology built from consciousness without taking into account the unconscious drives ...
In the foggy London that has become the center of the world after the industrial revolution and the maintenance of its colonies, Dr. Jekyll is a renowned doctor who, however, one day, begins to behave strangely, violent, uncontrolled... The testimonies of various characters They end up constructing a Mr. Hyde who seems inconceivable to come from the same renowned character.
A simple potion brought about the transformation. And now it only remains to consider that the murderer can only be eliminated by also removing his host from the way.
The black arrow
In this novel, Stevenson managed to make a wonderful foray into the historical fiction genre. The well-known conflict over the throne of England in the 30th century (War of the Roses) lasted for more than XNUMX years, reproducing itself as a dispute over an inheritance in which the people ended up shedding their blood in favor of an interest. or another.
They, the lackeys, were the thorns of the two roses (the two families with their shields marked by the red rose on one side and the white rose on the other). Stevenson seemed to want to unearth the intrahistory of those decades in which the houses of Lancaster and York disputed the great island.
Through Richard Dick Shelton and his hectic path to being appointed knight we enter a multitude of events of the time, at the same time that we know customs aspects no less sinister and endowed with that aspect of adventure, the outlaws, the conspiracies, the loves and misunderstandings ... A historical novel that maintains Stevenson's fundamental taste for adventure.
