Wednesday's Four!

In no particular order...

The Rose of Martinique: A Life of Napoleon's Josephine, Andrea Stuart (Macmillan, 2003)
I actually really rather enjoyed this, so I kind of wish I had written about it sooner (I think I read this a LONG time ago - late April, if my archived g-chats with my brother are correct). But I was in the midst of the Great April-May 2012 Bender (what - I was just supporting my friends!) so I suppose the fact I read it at all is pretty good. Stuart's a good writer, and I felt like I learned a lot, although I would have appreciated more context - Josephine turned out to be an interesting subject, but as a woman in a world where women's roles and rights were rapidly changing, as a creole who came to the very center of the center and then was pushed back out again, as the consort (and then discard) of one of the world's most powerful and polarizing figures, I would have loved to have heard more about what was going on around Josephine and how she, and her life, fit into that environment and were shaped by it / reflected it. I was also fairly pleased that Napoleon, not surprisingly, comes off as something of an insecure, egotistical douche, since that's always kind of how I pictured him...
[NB: I think this was published in the U.S. as Josephine: The Rose of Martinique]

*****

Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire, Flora Fraser (Knopf, 2009)
God no. To everything. I read this after Rose of Martinique, figuring I'd ease into Napoleon himself by approaching indirectly, via the women in his life, first, but this one ended my brief affair with the extended Bonaparte clan. I figured this would be something fun, I mean, the woman DID model for the Borghese Venus (which is still a gorgeous statue - seeing it in person years ago was cool), but d*mn, the woman was a whiny tramp. In all fairness, she seems to have had some really bad luck with her male companions, so maybe shopping around, while not the best idea, was understandable, but she's really not an appealing character at all, at least in Ms. Fraser's treatment, and if you come off like a childish, spoiled b*tch in your own biography, that's not good.

It also didn't help that this was a really terrible biography, totally sensationalistic and really, really speculative. I mean, I'm inclined to believe that Pauline did NOT sleep with her brother Napoleon, but I think if an author is going to bring up the subject of possible incest in a biography, she should be d*mn well prepared to take a stand, one way or the other, and back it up, not basically suggest it might well have been an issue, but that it wasn't a big one.

Referring to a possibly "more credible" rumor of incest (more credible than some others, that is), Fraser writes "The truth is, it seems almost inevitable, given the strong sex drive for which Pauline and Napoleon were both renowned, given, too, their mutual affection, their clannish affinity, that they should have experimented sexually together. Perhaps neither of them considered such sexual congress, if it took place, of great importance. Growing up in Corsica, they had been surrounded by examples of intermarriage among relations, even of technically incestuous unions such as those between uncles and nieces prohibited by the church. Marrying within the immediate community thus remained the norm on the island well into the nineteenth century."

WHAT THE WHAT???

I seriously almost thew the book across the room when I read that. So...liking sex and loving your sibling makes it "almost inevitable" that you'll end up having sex with your sibling? WHAT? And, I can't believe I'm even saying this, but there's incest and then there's incest. Uncle/niece, gross, certainly to our modern sensibilities, but not unheard of and not even close to the same as brother/sister. To say that because in Corsica people frequently married people they were related to, it wouldn't have been weird for Pauline and Napoleon to fool around, is like when people say it's less-bad if someone from the South fights dogs. Times a million. Yes, the norms you are exposed to growing up do shape what you consider "normal" or acceptable. But there are limits. In most places in the world, at most times in history (I think, I haven't exactly researched this), sex between siblings has been frowned upon. Seriously frowned upon. Fraser is stretching here, to put it kindly. Less kindly, and to quote one of the best lines from season-whatever of Pretty Little Liars, "b*tch crazy." (Seriously, the actor who plays Spencer - Troian Bellisario? - delivered that PERFECTLY).

Anyways, I really don't remember much else about the book after that point...

*****

The Lost Army of Cambyses, Paul Sussman (Thomas Dunne Books [St. Martin's Press], 2002)
A thriller, I guess you could call it? Opens with the death of a Greek mercenary in a sandstorm in ancient Egypt, then switches to a modern-day race to track down antiquities thieves and terrorists who are going to use the proceeds of a spectacular archaeological find to fund terrorism. And people fall in love. Or something like that. Predictable, the big reveal wasn't, but somewhat entertaining.  I think I had grabbed this forever ago because I liked the title, then never read it, then read it and was confused about why I had picked it up...

*****

India Black, Carol K. Carr (Berkeley Prime Crime, 2011)
Awful. I feel like I read something good about this, and requested it, and then it came and when I picked it up from the library I almost returned it because of the cheesy cover and the cheesier tagline: "A Madam of Espionage mystery." Yup. That's the series: "A Madam of Espionage." It wasn't even that terrible, I guess, it's just one of a million. Smart woman in Victorian England does her own thing (in this case, madam-ing and crime solving) despite pressure from men and The Man, there's a young, diamond-in-the-rough rapscallion to help out and be helped out, and a mildly brooding, very attractive man who eventually realizes that her independence and wits are even better than her looks. Blah.