Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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).

This book is, on the surface, a history of Napleon's last years in exile on Saint Helena. What it really is, however, is an evocative reliving of those final 6 years by a French writer who truly feels the presence of this chapter from history in the setting of modern Saint Helena. Napoleon, in this view, died as much from melancholy as from disease, and Jean-Paul Kauffman brilliantly invokes that feeling, allowing the reader to relive Napoleon's experience in a unique - and very French - way.

This is a strange mixture and I have to admit to very much disliking it when I first picked it up. It is a translated version of what was originally a French work and the English to me seemed a bit florid and dramatic. I am not sure if that is the translation or if the French naturally write in that style. I would however recommend people who are interested in Napoleon to persevere - it is a strange sort of book but worth the read.

I say this for two other reasons - firstly because Kauffmann has read just about every primary source about Napoleon's exile on St Helens - a tiny island pretty much in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and secondly because Kauffmann knows first hand about captivity.

After reading this book a little = and not enjoying it I read the author biography - this man spent some years as a captive in Beirut in the 1980's. Returning to the book I started to realise that this is more than just a book about Napoleon, or about a travellogue to the island. This is a story about captivity and its psychological side. Kauffmann is very clearly the right man to write about it. The oppression of captivity overwhelms the writing sometimes. Kauffman clearly found the place oppressive - he keeps talking of the town itself squeezed between two mountains - it is one of his repetitive themes and I get the sense that if he didn't sail out there expecting to dislike the place, his dislike of it coloured his later writings about it.

I think this book could just as easily be named 8 days on St Helens as the book is divided into chapters for each day. So his trip is dealt with chronologically - the information about Napoleon ducks and dives - often with seemingly little logic to it. However if you are looking to learn about Napoleon's last years they are touched on - more so Napoleon as a man is revealed. His impatience (he drove each day on the island in a carriage with two wives of his officers - but went at such high speed as to throw them around - a demonstration of power?) his arrogance.

There are also interesting insights into the man prior to his captivity - for instance I never knew Napoleon couldn't speak perfect French - (he spoke it badly and confusingly at times - muddling his words and pronunciations). However I don't think Kauffman explains anything new to most scholars of Napoleon. He mentions that Napoleon considered going to America before settling for surrendering to the English - why did he change his mind?

So you can read this book on many different levels - a story of St Helens, a mixed bag of Napoleonic history, or a story of captivity. All have different merits in this - but they are all mixed together. I don't know that I would recommend making a special trip to get it - but worth reading if you haven't much else to do.

I read this book on a flight to France, and was mesmerized by the author's lapidary prose and his ability to bring to the reader a keen sense of loneliness and desolation. According to the author, Napoleon spent a good deal of his last six years trying to figure out what went wrong at Waterloo...the sort of torment worthy of Greek mythology. Feeling broken and forgotten, the former emperor, to quote General McArthur, "faded away", dying as much of depression as of physiological causes.

A few days after finishing the book, I visited Napoleon's tomb at the Hotel des Invalides in Paris. It's very grand, and I'm sure he would have loved it. Enshrined, perhaps even resurrected, in this manner, Napoleon has the last laugh.

This is a fantastic, engrossing book! For all fans of Napoleon, it really grabs you, and brings you into the dreary, boring world that is St. Helena. Absorbing book, I highly recommend it!

It may be fair to call this book a meditation on how some places are perfectly fit to induce particular states of mind. As promised by the title, "The Black Room at Longwood" describes the prison by describing its effect on the prisoner.

Kauffmann describes the sights and smells of St. Helen in such detail that its desolation is almost palpable. He makes many self-conscious efforts to find the relics and remembrances of its most famous prisoner. Kauffmann brings the place to life--but such a life--dreary and meaningless--and contrasts it with known preferences and dislikes of Napoleon so that every little pinprick can be felt.

When I tried to picture as active a man as Napoleon Bonaparte in that place, I couldn't help but pity him (from my comfortable vantage point, in 2006). As described in the book, Napoleon's own mind was beginning to give way to the horror of that oppressed place by the time he died.

and Kauffmann tells it with language that can only be described as poetic. As promised, this book is a mix of travelogue, historical biography, and memoir -- it's not a blood-and-guts military history, and doesn't pretend to be one. I found it to be one of the most moving books I've ever read. Kauffmann was for several years a prisoner himself, and this book uses the trope of enforced confinement to explore what it means to be human. Pretty big theme to fit in a mere 300 pages (of glorious writing); pretty grand accomplishment. Makes me proud to be a human, for once.

...but more than that: a diary of a traveler voyaging to one of the more obscure places on the planet, a brief history of one of the most intriguing men in history. Lovely translation.