THE MAN WHO LOVED MATA HARI

by Dan Sherman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1985

Sherman's afterword states: ""The Man Who Loved Mata HaH is fiction extending from a core of truth."" And readers with romantic memories of Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro who hope to recapture some of Garbo's allure and mystery as the famed Dutch spy and exotic dancer will not be disappointed, since Sherman's novel exists almost solely for the foggy glow it evokes about early 20th-century spies, artists and decadent aristocrats. Of course, Garbo did not dance barebreasted or perform ""nude ballet""--which gave a certain lift to the real Mata Hari's exciting footwork and mock Indonesian gestures. In fact, the Garbo-Novarro pastiche had as little to do with the real Mata as Sherman's Mata has to do with the real Mata seen in Erika Ostrovsky's absorbing biography of the dancer, Eye of Dawn (1978), the most acutely characterized picture so far. Ostrovsky, however, happens to believe Mata Hari was an active German spy, which Sherman doesn't. For romantic inevitability, Sherman invents nearly all his main characters. Margaretha Zelle, stage name Mata Had (meaning ""Eye of Dawn""), begins her life in Paris as a pornographic photographer's model (nicely nude on a bicycle), then as a model for English painter Nicholas Gray, who is discovering the glories of the Impressionists. Zelle throughout the novel has no lasting love for anyone or anything but her own creature comforts, and is forever the upwardly mobile courtesan skipping about the capitals of Europe on the cash flow of her varied gentlemen-lovers. The very well-bred spies she unwittingly falls in with are all high spenders who conduct themselves as if independently wealthy, and so the novel expends tremendous descriptive energies on consumerism by candlelight and on the consuming of Zelle's glorious body. Over her ten years as a dazzling seductress--from 1904 to her fate before a French firing squad in 1914--her mindless sexuality stays as peppy and sparkling as a vintage champagne. Along the way one lover, Charles Dunbar, cannot bear it when she casts him off, and so becomes a master spy, dreams up a vicious dossier on her and engineers her final fall by inventing two incriminating telegrams. This novel is like rolling around on a rose-scented silk puff while waiting for something earnest to happen. All the complications are about characters as fictional as the pith-helmeted actor who steps down from a movie screen in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. With no real people to give body to her historical presence, Zelle herself becomes a featherweight fiction with no believable core of truth, despite Sherman's protestations that this is the real Mata Hari.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1985

ISBN: 0759299773

Page Count: -

Publisher: Donald Fine

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985

Categories: FICTION