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Rating: The Novel of novels, the primordial lava of pages and pages of literature, the whip crack whose echoes are still heard in every book.
Stevenson takes the eternal theme of the double and sets it in an engaging plot and in a soft and pleasant prose.
The novel takes place in a nineteenth-century London full of shadows, puffs of smoke, and honest men. The narrator is the notary Utterson, keeper of Jekyll's will and his good friend. During one of the usual Sunday walks of the notary with his friend Enfield, the subject falls on a curious case witnessed by the latter. One night while he was returning home, he saw a figure with an animalistic gait trample a child near the residence of the esteemed Dr. Jekyll.
The prudent arms himself with a gun
and locks the door,
forgetting about a much different specter
that is near him.
Upon the arrival of the few passersby, Hyde's inhuman figure reveals itself in all its vehemence, although presenting nothing particularly deformed externally, as if it were his soul, stained with wickedness, standing out to the eyes of others.
Hyde is corporeality, desire, transgression that Jekyll hides and projects into another of himself Hyde is the price paid by man on the path of reason; it is the dust under the carpet.
To hush the matter, Hyde promises to grant a substantial compensation, thus steps aside for a moment and returns with a check signed by Dr. Jekyll.
From this point on, an obscene doubt will arise in the bureaucratic mind of the good Utterson, a doubt he will try to dismiss like an annoying hiccup but that will torment him, following him into the heart of dreams, taking the darkest forms. Like an amphibian on dry land, Hyde begins to overshadow the whole of London, extending his shadow even into the dustiest rooms. With unparalleled mastery, Stevenson describes to us the growing anxiety of Utterson, the most indigestible suspicion that rustles above Sunday lunches, the breeze that becomes a storm.
No Sir, I make a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I take.
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