The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena [Hardcover]

Jean-Paul Kauffmann (Author), Tom Clancy (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 1999

Like his subject, Napoleon, author Jean-Paul Kauffmann has experienced captivity, as a three-year hostage in Beirut. He brings his insider's knowledge to this moving account of the most famous French soldier's last years in seclusion on a tropical island. After his defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was exiled and imprisoned by the British on the island of St. Helena. He became increasingly withdrawn, surviving on a diet of memories that he recounted to the few people around him. But the book -- part history, part travelogue -- portrays the leader as a prisoner also of his mind, poisoned by nostalgia for his triumphs and grief over his defeats. "A haunting, unforgettable book....Kauffmann captures the desolate atmosphere of Napoleon's last home with evocative precision." -- Boston Globe

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This is an unusually intelligent, elegiac book; not merely an account of Napoleon's last days in exile on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena but a meditation on the interrelations of past and present and the shadow a figure as gigantic as Napoleon casts onto futurity. On one level, the book is a travelogue, as Jean-Paul Kauffmann revisits modern St. Helena and describes what he finds; the small-scale lives of the islanders are related with tenderness as well as humor. But we also learn a great deal about Napoleon as Kauffmann passes through the places associated with him and attempts to get inside the head of the deposed emperor.

There is a danger of pretentiousness, and there are moments when the Gallic gush is a little much; but overall the sheer force of Kauffmann's imagination fuses the whole into a powerful and affecting unity. In particular, his lyrical, poetic style has been well translated (by Patricia Clancy) and there are many striking moments. The beaches of St. Helena, for instance, are described as "black shingle, shiny as nuts of coal." Even the sunrise in this part of the world has a prison-like feel: "only one ray from the rising sun manages to pierce the clouds, falling on a corner of the coast as through a basement window." Thought-provoking and often exquisite, this is a unique sort of history. --Adam Roberts, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

A bestseller in France and winner of that country's Prix Femina, this stark meditation on Napoleon's confinement on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena is haunted by the fact that Kauffmann, too, has been a prisoner. In 1985, while he was working as a reporter for a French weekly, he was captured by Shiite Muslims in Beirut and imprisoned for three years. He never mentions it in the book, but this experience colors the entire text. Lured by the idea "that the upheaval caused by a disaster or a tragedy leaves a mark, or at the very least a ripple in the air" at its site, Kauffmann traveled to Napoleon's final home, Longwood, to reimagine the emperor's last five and a half years, which were spent in a draughty, damp house. With "300 meter-high cliffs that fall sheer into the ocean" and no port, St. Helena is so inescapable that, once he arrived, Napoleon was never actually imprisoned. Yet he spent much of his time in his bedroom, which measured only 17 square meters. In a series of eight diary-like sections, Kauffmann discusses Napoleon's career and the corrosive effects the boredom of captivity had on his health. Kauffmann has an eye for telling detail: he notices that St. Helena has been rubbed off of the globe in Longwood's sitting room. As he flits between imagining Napoleon's last days and describing Longwood as it is today (a strange, Conrad-like backwater held by the U.K., though the French own Longwood), his text remains, despite some truly beautiful writing, oddly static, imprisoned within the plush walls of its melancholy sentences. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; 1st US edition (May 31, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568581289
• ISBN-13: 978-1568581286
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,316,838 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Theme Is Reconciliation, January 26, 2000

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Michael Lima (Fresno, California USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena (Hardcover)

I am not disparaging the earlier reviews of this book. But, I found the theme to be one of reconciliation. Kauffmann used his trip to reconcile the mythical glory of Napoleon's reign with the factual emptiness surrounding his imprisonment. Along the way, he found other aspects that needed reconciliation. The "Saints" enjoy the benefits of their status with the United Kingdom, yet don't appreciate them. The French consul's father had a productive life in France, yet chose to live as a recluse in St. Helena. The consul paints flowers that grow on a desert island. And Napoleon's former tomb is a lush contrast to his living quarters at Longwood. There are also failed attempts at reconciliation, such as Napoleon's frequent attempts to understand how he lost at Waterloo. Behind all these attempts is the almost silent struggle by Kauffmann to reconcile his own experiences as a captive with those that Napoleon endured.

It's a very ambitious project that Kauffmann undertook. Fortunately, he pulled it off with incredible elegance. His descriptions of St. Helena and Longwood give a vivid image of the bleakness of both settings. Addtionally, his reflections on Napoleon's deteriorating condition are very poignant. Non-fiction does not ususally make one reflect on such things as the effect of isolation on a soul and the need for reconciliation in one's life. The fact that Kauffman has made a book that tackles such issues in an intelligent manner makes it one which everyone should read.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical, September 10, 2000

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Atheen M. Wilson "Atheen" (Mpls, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena (Paperback)

This may well seem to be a confusing review. I did not particularly enjoy the book, but that was because of the person that I am, and not because the book wasn't good. In fact, I consider it to be well written. The Black Room at Longwood is a lyrical work written by an author with a strong sense of environment and the "presence" of historical events. However it is also more of an introspective, personal experience, a mental voyage back into time than a work of history. Since I tend to prefer the cold, dry facts without emotional garnish, I found it a less captivating work than a person who finds ungarnished fact a little dull might well find it. The prose is almost poetry, although how much of this is due to it's translator's talent and how much to the author's I would be unable to say. The psychological character of the environment of St. Helena and of the house of Longwood, that housed Napoleon and his fellow exiles during the last years of his life, is vividly recreated for the reader. One doesn't just learn of the personality and facts of the exile, one lives the experience through the author's words. Basing his description on extensive research into the subject, Kauffmann visits the site and describes it and the events that took place there in such a way that the reader actually travels with him back into the early 19th Century to watch and experience. A vividly written work.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Likeable narrator transcends the credibilty gap, May 29, 2000

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"[e-mail]" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena (Hardcover)

As a biography, as an autobiography and as a travel book this works very well - yet we learn more about the author's life from the back cover than we do from the 200+ pages that precede it; Napoleon's life is told in a small selection of anecdotes and the author only visited a few places on St Helena during his brief stay. Some of the best writing concerns the battle of Eylau and the author's visit to the battlefield in Eastern Europe, but many St Helena passages are also wonderfully evocative.

Kauffmann has a good eye for island life and a strange, but likeable enthusiasm for his subject. The book opens with these two lines: "I have never had any particular liking for Napoloeon. In fact I sometimes find the fascination he exerts over certain contempories of mine rather suspect." He spends the next 240 pages failing to hide the fact that he not only likes Napoleon but is so fascinated by him that he has become a posthumous Bonaparte stalker, shadowing the emperor from Cuba to Corsica; Lithuania to St Helena.

I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anybody, yet the Napoloeon who fascinates Kauffmann and inspires so much veneration to this day (letters addressed to the emperor were still arriving on the island in the 1990s! ) is a myth created by Bonaparte and perpetuated by those who came after him. There is a gap between Kauffman's Napoleon and the real Bonaparte. There is something faintly absurd & shocking about the French government retaining an honorary diplomatic presence on the remote island in honour of one of the nastiest, most self-glorying rulers in history, a tyrannical dictator whose lust for personal glory cost so many hundreds of thousands of Europeans their lives; a man of no principles, no scruples, a war criminal who created the sort of personality cult that was a model for half of the Eatern European despots of the latter half of the twentieth century. Kauffmann seems to think there is something perfidious about the Allies treatment of the Corsican monster; something tragic about the fact that he wasn't given one more chance to wreak havoc on the continent of his birth. He even seems to think Brits he meets on St Helena ought to feel bad about the way their government dealt with Bonaparte!

The book works because the author is (in complete contrast to the General) a gentle, generous, modest, self-mocking man with a great sense of irony (about himself, his journey and Bonaparte).