BOOK REVIEW: Stevenson's Treasure by Mark Wiederanders

SYNOPSIS

STEVENSON’S TREASURE is a fictional but carefully researched story about the year Robert Louis Stevenson leaves all that is safe in Scotland and journeys to California on what has to be one of the most romantic, ill-advised but successful quests a literary figure has ever made. Unknown and in shaky health, the 29-year-old writer in the summer of 1879 crosses the Atlantic by steamer and the American continent by rail. His objective is scandalous: to make an American art student he met in France, Fanny Osbourne, his wife despite the facts that she is already married (unhappily), has children and is ten years older than him. 

Showing up on her Monterey doorstep half-dead from several ailments, “Louis” nonetheless proposes marriage. Although her heart longs to say “yes,” she turns him down for a variety of practical reasons. Louis finds cheap lodgings nearby and vows to stay as long as it takes to overcome her objections. In their year-long struggle to somehow have a future together, Louis and Fanny must contend not just with his abysmal health but his inability to sell his writing, her handsome but philandering husband, a contentious teenage daughter and a skeptical ten-year-old son. From this mixture, stirred on a palette of landscapes that include France, Monterey, San Francisco, Calistoga and the Highlands of Scotland comes a more complete triumph than Stevenson had hoped for…

GoodReads * Amazon  * Barnes & Noble

~~~oOo~~~

REVIEW

How often do we want to know more about the authors of our favorite books?  How about ALL THE TIME!  But what if we adore literary classics?  The authors are having their 200-400th birthday and it's rather unlikely that we'll be able to contact them directly.  Mr. Wiederanders has given readers the next best thing:  a carefully and extensively researched history of Robert Louis Stevenson with additional words that make the story leap off the page and involve you as you read.

At one point in the story, Fanny has refused Louis's offer of marriage, and he hikes into the mountains above Monterey, and nearly dies.  Part of me already knew he would eventually survive, as "Treasure Island" had yet to be written.  However, another part of me was practically yelling, "Take your time, don't push yourself so much,"  because I was worried about him!

Some people may have a problem with the fact that Fanny is married when she and "Louis" (as he was called) first meet, and remains so until well after Louis follows her to California.  For myself, I am not a fan of the "erotica" genre.  But the physical intimacy in "Stevenson's Treasure" is handled in a straight-forward and mature way, something which I appreciated immensely.

In my opinion, many of the best books entertain us, educate us, and inspire us to find out more about a subject or person.  "Stevenson's Treasure" is one such book.  If you love to read, it is grand entertainment.  If you fancy yourself a writer, it will provide excellent insight into a writer's life.

~~~oOo~~~

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Mark Wiederanders lives in Northern California and writes about the private lives of famous authors. His screenplay about William Shakespeare’s family, “Taming Judith” was a finalist in the Academy of Motion Pictures’ annual screenwriting competition and was optioned by a film company. The idea for his current novel, STEVENSON’S TREASURE hatched during a visit to Carmel, when Mark learned that Robert Louis Stevenson suffered a near-fatal collapse in 1879 while hiking nearby. What was the young, as-yet unknown Scottish writer doing so far from home?

To write the novel that resulted from this question, Mark studied hundreds of historical letters and visited sites near him in Monterey, San Francisco, and Calistoga. Then he followed Stevenson’s footsteps to Europe, lodging at the Stevenson home in Edinburgh followed by a week in the Highlands cottage where RLS wrote TREASURE ISLAND. Mark is also a research psychologist (Ph.D, University of Colorado) who has studied treatment programs for delinquents and the criminally insane. His interests include acting in community theater (recently a Neil Simon play), downhill skiing, golf, and spending time with his wife and three grown children.

For more information please visit Mark Wiederander’s website and blog. You can also find him on Facebook.

~~~oOo~~~

INTERVIEW

1.  What is the hardest job you've had?

My hardest and scariest job was working as a “red-light man” in a cannery in San Jose, CA.  When a can of peaches or apricots jammed in the machinery that moved the cans through steam-cookers, the machine shut down and a red light flashed.  I had to climb on top of the cooker which was as big as a train car, throw open its top, search through the hissing steam till I found the jam and hack the can out with a pole.  Meanwhile a foreman would pace and yell at me to hurry and fix the thing before hundreds of cans of fruit were overcooked and ruined.  Some of the old-timers bore scars from burns or had fingers missing, but I escaped with scrapes and singes.  I was glad to have this summer job, though – it paid much better than fast-food jobs and helped put me through college.

2.  Are fans of the authors about whom you write hyper-vigilant as to the details of your stories?

So far, the fans of the authors have been complimentary, perhaps because I love researching the details of historical characters to get them right.  To write Stevenson’s Treasure I located collections of the actual letters they wrote, scrapbooks they kept and clothes they wore.  I pored over sketches that Fanny Osbourne had drawn of her children, telegrams she had sent to her husband from France and a letter she had written to a friend about her son’s fatal illness.  Seeing her small, neat handwriting on black-edged stationery moved me deeply, and reminded me that the persons on whom I had based my novel had once lived, breathed and had the same basic hopes, dreams and losses that all of us experience.  I was especially gratified when a descendant of Fanny’s family came to a reading and said he had enjoyed the book.  The story about William Shakespeare I wrote presented a different challenge.  After five hundred years, few objects from his personal life survive, except for one remarkable document, his Last Will.  The changes he made in bequests to his youngest daughter, scrawled in a very weak hand possibly as the poet lay dying, inspired the first fiction that I sold – a screenplay.

3.  Have you ever acted in a play you wrote?  Would you?

I have not acted in a play I wrote.  I would rather trust a role written by a master playwright.  My feeling about this is kind of like Mark Twain, who said he would never belong to the kind of club that would accept him as a member!

4.  I was with you on the subjects of Scotland, writing, skiing and theatre; but I'm not a huge fan of golf.  Maybe you can explain its popularity? :O)

For some people, golf is belonging to a country club where rich guys hang out and cut business deals.  For me, it is an excuse for a long walk along the river at a county park near my house, seeing deer, geese and coyotes while trying to whack a little ball forward.  I used to like archery, too, and come to think of it I’ve always liked the way arrows, baseballs, javelins and golf balls arc through a blue sky toward targets.  You have to concentrate on the ball, but not try too hard.  Very Zen-like.

5.  Can you share with us one of your grandmother's stories?

When I was twelve years old Grandma, who lived to the age of 102, took me to a farmhouse on the Seco River in south-central Texas where she had spent the first six years of her life.  She showed me the small windows through which her mother and aunts had taken turns keeping watch on the surrounding hills and trees, all night long for many months while the men were away, fighting in the Civil War.  With the nearest neighbor four miles away, the house would have been an easy target for the Comanche raiding parties that had attacked other homesteads in the region with tragic results.  By keeping the house dark and propping rifles out of varying windows they pretended that the property was well defended, and thus avoided attack.

6.  Why did you settle on the 'niche' of fictionalizing the lives of famous authors?

When I first tried writing fiction I found that developing plots was easier than creating believable characters.  So I started reading the classics and especially Shakespeare plays to try to learn how the masters wrote memorable characters.  That led to reading authors’ biographies and trying to guess which persons in their lives were used as models for the great characters they created on the page.  It was a fun way of being an armchair-psychologist.  I began writing plotlines that featured these persons in some of the big events involving the authors’ lives.  The idea that Shakespeare’s daughter Judith was the model for the comic role of Kate, in Taming of the Shrew as well as the tragic role of Cordelia, in King Lear, seemed to work well in my story about his private life.  I extended the method to Robert Louis Stevenson, and now am working on a story about another historical author who led a fascinating personal life.

7.  What is the most difficult thing about writing for you?
Rewriting.  It is great fun to sit down with a cup of coffee and knock out the first draft of a scene or chapter.  Writers like this draft stage when they can move fast, be creative, use the right-brain and not worry too much about details.  Usually, though, when others look at these first-inspiration tries they find holes in the plot, unbelievable aspects of the characters and clumsy wording.  I used to resent hearing about these flaws, but now I know to take a deep breath, listen to critiques, and then be ready to revise, revise, revise until it is a thing of art!

8.  Do any of your kids have the writing bug?

My son is a professional musician, one daughter is a social worker and the other daughter works in evaluating healthcare systems.  They all write very well, and from time to time seem like they have caught the bug.  One of my daughters when she was nine co-wrote “The Dinosaur Egg” with me, a children’s story that won first prize in a Friends of the Library contest.  My son wrote and illustrated comic strips for fun, and my other daughter drafted a picture book to educate the children of clients about adoption.  Someday I suspect that at least one of them will write (professionally) again.

9.  If you could live during any period in history, which would it be?

Except for not yet having antibiotics and inoculations to protect against deadly diseases, the 1870s through the First World War must have been a wonderful time to be alive, at least for those with adequate means.  Judging from the research I did on that era while writing Stevenson’s Treasure, I love the way people read lots of books, wrote long letters to each other, conversed, enjoyed live music, and travelled at a leisurely pace to the ends of the earth in grand style by railroad and steamship.  They seemed to savor a connected, civilized kind of life that has mostly vanished today, at least in the urban United States.

10.  Care to share a tip or some writing advice?

If you haven’t been published yet, even if you consider yourself a good writer take some high-quality classes and workshops on the craft of writing fiction.  Apply yourself seriously to doing the assigned exercises.  Join writers’ organizations, make friends with other writers and be open to what they say about your writing.  Give generously to other writers – read their stories, buy their books, offer to review them – and when you need help, they will gladly give it back to you.  Most of the time, writing is a solitary process, but the further you go in it, the more you will need the friendship, advice and support of others.

~~~oOo~~~

(Disclosure:  I received a print copy of this book from the author and publisher via Historical Fictional Virtual Book Tours in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.)

Please click the banner at the top to see the rest of the stops on this tour!