The Death of Napoleon by Simon Leys | eBook

As he bore a vague resemblance to the Emperor, the sailors on board the Hermann-Augustus Stoeffer had nicknamed him Napoleon. And so, for convenience, that is what we shall call him.
Besides, he was Napoleon. . . .

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.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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. (Sept.)

Gilbert Taylor

In reality, old Boney whiled away his last six years dictating his memoirs, known to historians as the "gospel of St. Helena." In fiction, he pops up in the darnedest places, and in Leys' compact, precisely crafted tableau, the place is none other than Napoleon's incandescent noggin. Based on the postulate that the emperor escapes from his exile after Waterloo, Leys' work is no light what-if conceit. It tackles the question of greatness, a morality tale dense with ambiguity. Traveling incognito, Napoleon finds but whispers of his former stature. The plot to bring him back unravels, leaving him alone; on the Waterloo battlefield swarms of imposter-guides make mush of what happened where; and in a satiric improvement in his fortunes, he organizes with military efficiency a successful Parisian fruit business. Some army veterans recognize him, but a return to glory eludes him, definitively so when the news arrives that the double left behind on St. Helena has died: "Napoleon is dead!" Entertaining and clever, this is a sweetening reminder of the ephemerality of great achievements--and by implication those of the not so great.

From the Publisher

What a pleasure to read a real writer...The Death of Napoleon is utterly satisfying sentence by sentence and scene by scene, but it is also compulsively readable...By giving us a Napoleon who cannot find how to retrieve [his public] face, Simon Leys throws light on our universal need to bring inner and outer reality together, to understand who we really are. —Gabriel Josipovici, The Times Literary Supplement

“I am glad to report that Simon Leys’s The Death of Napoleon has one hell of an idea—the absurdity of trying to retrieve time or glory—and is written with the grace of a poem.” —Edna O’Brien, The Sunday Times

“Alternative history...is enjoyable and at the same time, like all daydreaming, brings a sensation of guilt. But The Death of Napoleon is also a fable, and Simon Leys is an expert fabulist.” —Penelope Fitzgerald, The New York Times Book Review

“Entertaining and clever, this is a sweetening reminder of the ephemerality of great achievements—and by implication those of the not so great.” —Booklist

“An elegant and engaging piece of alternative history, gently tragic and wryly comic.” —D. J. Enright, The Times Literary Supplement

“A small masterpiece. So much spirit, so much insolence, and so much emotion joined in so few pages overwhelmingly earn the reader’s enthusiasm and praise. One closes the book regretfully, sincerely hoping that Simon Leys will not stop there.” —Corinne Desportes, Le Magazine Littéraire

“Powerful, touching—and delightful, too—this invention of a post-Waterloo career led by Bonaparte—not on St. Helena.” —Francis Steegmuller

“[Simon Leys's] beautiful, small novel…[by] an elegant stylist who brought to all of his subjects both lightness of wit and philosophical depth, and The Death of Napoleon is a case in point. Beyond the delightful invention and whimsy, this comic tale of Napoleon’s imaginary yet all-too-human tribulations poses serious questions about the relationship of truth, history and imagination….The truth of Napoleon, Leys’s novel proposes, is that he was a man, subject to laws of chance, indifference and mortality, one among many participants in the human comedy.” —Martin Riker, The Wall Street Journal

The Death of Napoleon

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