The Death of Napoleon
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Napoleon Bonaparte escapes exile just before death in this quirky alternate history novel that reimagines the life of the great French emperor.
“This comic tale of Napoleon’s imaginary yet all-too-human tribulations poses serious questions about the relationship of truth, history and imagination.” —The Wall Street Journal
Napoleon has escaped from St. Helena, leaving a double behind him. Now disguised as the cabin hand Eugène Lenormand and enduring the mockery of the crew (Napoleon, they laughingly nickname the pudgy, hopelessly clumsy little man), he is on his way back to Europe, ready to make contact with the huge secret organization that will return him to power. But then the ship on which he sails is rerouted from Bordeaux to Antwerp. When Napoleon disembarks, he is on his own.
He revisits the battlefield of Waterloo, now a tourist destination. He makes his way to Paris. Mistakes, misunderstandings, and mishaps conduct our puzzled hero deeper and deeper into the mystery of Napoleon.
Adapted into Alan Taylor’s 2001 film The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Death of Napoleon is a smart alternative history for the Napoleon obsessed—as deep and compelling as it is quirky and fresh.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Leys's deliciously sardonic short fable, Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from imprisonment on the isle of St. Helena, where an officer who impersonates him is executed. The exiled emperor becomes a cabin hand on a crayfish schooner, returns to the Continent under an alias, takes a tourist excursion to the battlefield of Waterloo and eventually makes his way to Paris, where loyal Bonapartists are mourning the death of their hero. While coolly plotting his return to power, the deposed ruler lapses into domestic joy and small-time prosperity as a melon merchant, and becomes the live-in companion of a simple, warmhearted widow whom he knows only as ``the Ostrich.'' On his deathbed, he fails a divine test, too enamored of his lost glory to care for basic human ties. Leys, the pen name of Pierre Ryckmans, a sinologist ( Chinese Shadows ) and art historian, writes an elegant, precise prose that ironically evokes the Napoleonic age. His exquisite tale, a gem of a book, can be read as a parable on the folly of hero-worship, the perils of self-justifying notions of destiny and the vanity of all human striving.
