Rollicking good, admittedly unhistorical, fun—complete with all the dish on the great and powerful, and what they wore, that...
In Erickson’s fanciful retelling, Empress Josephine personifies, ahead of her time, the “head for business/bod for sin” dichotomy.
By dubbing this a “historical entertainment” rather than a historical novel, Erickson (The Last Wife of Henry VIII, 2006, etc.) avoids a more apt classification: gossipy historical romance. Josephine was born Rose, nickname Yeyette, to a failed sugar planter in Martinique. Her first and lifelong liaison is with Donovan de Gautier, a mysterious, sun-kissed adonis who introduces her to sex on the beach. Her platonic love is Scipion, a dashing lieutenant. Betrothed to cruel, foppish Vicomte Alexandre, Josephine journeys to Paris, where she wows the aristocracy with her Tarot fortunetelling. After bearing two children, she takes up money lending. During the French Revolution, she keeps her head; Alexandre is not so lucky. Impoverished, Josephine becomes the mistress of a wealthy military contractor. When she’s not dancing naked in the contractor’s orgy grotto, she’s feathering her own nest hawking substandard goods to the military, which is how she meets little corporal, now general Bonaparte. Josephine seemingly marries Napoleon out of curiosity, to see what happens next. Bonaparte’s coarse, scheming Corsican siblings and his harpy of a mother detest her. Bonaparte himself is so irascible, paranoiac, bilious and profligate, it’s a wonder he manages to conquer half the civilized world. Fortunately, readers share Josephine’s curiosity. How can she abide life with this monster, who castigates his older wife for failing to dress age-appropriately? He still runs cravenly to her for solace even after he’s divorced her to marry teenage Archduchess Marie-Louise. Fulfilling the destiny preordained for her by a shaman on Martinique, and following a comet, no less, Josephine travels to Russia, where she convinces Napoleon not to retreat from Moscow until the first snow—striking a blow not just for the first-wives club, but for the future of Europe!
Rollicking good, admittedly unhistorical, fun—complete with all the dish on the great and powerful, and what they wore, that an Empire-waisted fashionista could desire.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36735-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
An attention-getting writer (novels, Memento Mori. The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Bachelors, and short stories, The Go-Away Bird) pursues her multi-personae interests, her concern with religion, and her refusal to allow the reader to be at one with her purpose. Here she disperses her story (a loose but provocative thing) over an extended — and interrupted — period (thirty years) during which Miss Brodie, (in her prime) holds young minds in thrall, at first in delight at the heady freedom she offers from the rigid, formal precepts of Edinburgh's Marcia Blaine (day) School, later in loyalty to her advanced sedition against the efforts to have her removed. Finally the girls grow up — and Monica, Rose, Eunice, Jenny, Mary, and Sandy, (particularly Sandy with her pig-like eyes) separate, and the "Brodie set" dissolves- with war, death, marriage, career, and conversion to Catholicism. But there still is a central focus — who among them betrayed Miss Brodie to the headmistress so that a long-desired dismissal was effective? In this less-than-a-novel, more-than-a-short story, there is the projection of a non-conformist teacher of the thirties, of a complex of personalties (which never becomes personal lives), and of issues which, floating, are never quite tangible. But Muriel Spark is sharp with her eyes and her ears and the craftiness of her craftsmanship is as precision-tooled as the finest of her driest etching. With the past record, the publisher's big push, and The New Yorker advance showing, this stands on its own.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1961
ISBN: 0061711292
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1961
A bold but flawed debut novel.
There’s a mystery, a coming-of-age, abundant melodrama and even more abundant medical lore in this idiosyncratic first novel from a doctor best known for the memoir My Own Country (1994).
The nun is struggling to give birth in the hospital. The surgeon (is he also the father?) dithers. The late-arriving OB-GYN takes charge, losing the mother but saving her babies, identical twins. We are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1954. The Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a trained nurse who had met the British surgeon Thomas Stone on a sea voyage ministering to passengers dying of typhus. She then served as his assistant for seven years. The emotionally repressed Stone never declared his love for her; had they really done the deed? After the delivery, Stone rejects the babies and leaves Ethiopia. This is good news for Hema (Dr. Hemalatha, the Indian gynecologist), who becomes their surrogate mother and names them Shiva and Marion. When Shiva stops breathing, Dr. Ghosh (another Indian) diagnoses his apnea; again, a medical emergency throws two characters together. Ghosh and Hema marry and make a happy family of four. Marion eventually emerges as narrator. “Where but in medicine,” he asks, “might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained?” The question is key, revealing Verghese’s intent: a family saga in the context of medicine. The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers. The boys’ Ethiopian identity goes unexplored. Shiva is an enigma, though it’s no surprise he’ll have a medical career, like his brother, though far less orthodox. They become estranged over a girl, and eventually Marion leaves for America and an internship in the Bronx (the final, most suspenseful section). Once again a medical emergency defines the characters, though they are not large enough to fill the positively operatic roles Verghese has ordained for them.
A bold but flawed debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41449-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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