Robert James Fletcher (1877–1965)
Autore di Isles of Illusion: Letters from the South Seas (Century Travellers)
Sull'Autore
Opere di Robert James Fletcher
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Data di nascita
- 1877
- Data di morte
- 1965
- Sesso
- male
- Luogo di residenza
- New Hebrides (Vanuatu)
- Istruzione
- Oxford University
Utenti
Recensioni
Statistiche
- Opere
- 1
- Utenti
- 16
- Popolarità
- #679,947
- Voto
- 3.3
- Recensioni
- 2
- ISBN
- 2
- Lingue
- 1
Along the way, Asterisk describes his life as a surveyor. Once he is caught on a volcanic island that is erupting and is trapped between two streams of lava. He barely makes it out to sea to survive. He also tells of his life as a government translator, a plantation manager, and an owner. Trained as a physician, he further takes note of the disease among the natives and Europeans, especially dysentery, malaria, and assorted infections and fevers. All the while, Asterisk sinks further in despair, becoming filled with animosity towards all his fellow men and becoming a sort of unperson.
Only when Asterisk leaves the New Hebrides and his wife and son for Tahiti does he begin to recover. The book ends with his letters from 1920, and he has settled into a Tahitian paradise, full of color, benevolent solitude, and tranquility.
That is the picture. We do know more about Asterisk than these letters alone tell us. James Norman Hall, the American writer who lived for decades in Tahiti, went looking for Asterisk's house some years later. Hall remarked how only a remnant of clothing still existed in the dilapidated husk of a house. For despite the apparent happy ending of Isles of Illusion, Asterisk soon moved on from Tahiti. Eventually, he returned to England toward the end of the 1920s, where he became a school teacher. Before starting his grand adventure in 1912, he had held the same position in England. For all his craving for adventure and the idylls of the South Sea that Robert Louis Stevenson set going in him, he returned whence he came.
Asterisk never married. He died in 1965 at the age of 87, living in his sister's house, apparently alone, captured in his solitude once more. One only wonders if, towards the end, Asterisk looked back on his remarkable life and felt regret for what was lost to him--a native wife, a son, a family, a life in the tropics away from the civilization that both repelled and attracted him. It is a pity Asterisk failed to write more letters in the twilight of his life that would have let us know. When I think of this book, I will always imagine him a withered old man, stuffed away in a chair too big for him, secluded in the semi-darkness of his sister's Edwardian home. And maybe always looking back to the days of the ocean, the mountains, the lagoons, the colors, and, yes, the volcanic dust, the insects, heat, disease, and isolation. Was the sedate life in England really better?
A fascinating chapter, "Gone Native in Isles of Illusion In Search of Asterisk in Epi," about Asterisk was published by Michael Young in History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology. Written in 1992, Young not only discusses Asterisk's book at length, but he also tracked down his family during the 1980s. It is utterly fascinating to read and is available for free as an eBook at the University of California Press' website: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft509nb347&chunk.id=d0...… (altro)