CLEOPATRA

Filled with carefully researched detail, this action-packed fictional portrait of the ancient and mysterious Egyptian empress follows her from adolescence until her end.

Cleopatra VII is a Ptolemy, heir to the throne of Egypt—but as many of us think we know, she came to a tragic end due to her ill-fated love affairs and poor military strategy. Author El-Arifi pulls from many scholarly sources to create her novel’s queen, a woman of Africa who owes nothing to future mythologizing; she’s a healer, a would-be scholar, and a fiercely loving mother. This Cleopatra lives for her people; loves freely, both men and women; and leaves little to chance, employing care and cruelty in equal measures. Her great documented loves, Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius, appear, but so does her life’s companion, Charmion, not to mention her perfidious siblings, sister Arsinoe and brother Theos. At one point, Cleopatra says of her sister, “We had been close once; our secrets were each other’s. But somewhere along the paths of our lives we had diverged”— but she never explains how or why. Cleopatra goes out of her way in other sections to describe her emotions, so her silence on her relationship with Arsinoe feels odd, due both to their kinship and their eventual clashes. This lacuna might indicate cultural difference, as well as attention to context—we now acknowledge that emotions might be different depending on eras—but given the plethora of emotions otherwise imputed to this dynamic queen, it’s a puzzling omission. We also now acknowledge family estrangement, but we usually see a first-person narrator understanding why a breach has occurred. Still, this Pharaoh’s imperious ability to here don gem-laden robes, there order a royal family’s murders, or hold an intimate banquet of boar and goose is a vision of absolute power and absolute control. If Cleopatra occasionally contradicts herself, claiming to care more for her family than for her people, it seems to be such a maverick’s prerogative.

A worthy addition to novels about powerful women, despite some shallow glosses on character motivations.