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Napoleon's Rosebud
- De: Humphry Knipe
- Narrado por: Mary Jane Wells
- Duración: 7 h y 40 m
- Versión completa
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General5 out of 5 stars 2
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Narración:5 out of 5 stars 2
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Historia5 out of 5 stars 2
You are the high spirited 19-year-old daughter of a penniless widow, born and brought up on an isolated, windswept South Atlantic island, a girl with virtually no prospects, when out of the blue the most famous man on earth falls into your lap. Still smarting from his defeat at Waterloo, still the hero of Liberals everywhere, Napoleon has been exiled to tiny Saint Helena, because it is the remotest and most easily defended island in the British Empire. But far from being broken by defeat, Napoleon’s fertile imagination seethes with escape schemes.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book, Great Performance
- De Tom Huckabee en 11-21-20
- Napoleon's Rosebud
- De: Humphry Knipe
- Narrado por: Mary Jane Wells
Great book, Great Performance
Revisado: 11-21-20
I read a lot, mostly non-fiction, mostly history, screenplays, and poetry. I don't read a lot of novels. But I read everything Mr. Knipe writes in whatever genre or form, and it seems like he does it all.
Admittedly, I know him. But I know him because he's a great writer, and it's my business to know great writers. He does his research, he works like an ox, and edits with a clear head and humility; he rewrites and rewrites, polishing every word and paragraph. He seeks to educate and entertain and always does both with the soul of a poet. There is real history in this book, which one might assume to be the author's fantasy, if you didn't know better.
Besides research and craft, there is psychological insight into these historical characters' souls. I feel like I know Napoleon, now, something I never felt before from school, movies, or other books.
Napoleon's Rosebud, disguised perhaps as a bodice-ripping sex farce, is an enlightening work about power, politics, sex and the nexus between them. Now, I know what it feels like to be the most powerful man in the world, defeated, sequestered in a God-forsaken place, plotting my return to power, using everyone and everything at my disposal to fulfill my megalomaniacal ambitions; and I know what it feels like to be a young provincial woman, the belle of the local ball, seduced by an older man of, fame, discipline, brilliance, and authority.
It's light of tone but dense of detail with hints of deeper meanings and shades of modern resonance, as if to say that these events 200 hundred years ago on a tiny, underpopulated island as far from our world as you could get, then or now, are relevant to the burning issues of 2020. (Is Donald Trump the Napoleon of today? There are vast differences between the two men but some key similarities, i.e. reluctance to accept defeat.)
This audio version by the award--winning, classically-trained actor Mary Jane Wells evokes and exudes gravitas, dignity, pathos, mischief, coquettishness, raw masculinity, military honor, pomposity, obsequiousness, superiority, terror, deceit-- intermittently, appropriately, brilliantly--in the multiple characters she essays, acting out every part as great story tellers do.
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