Cleopatra Dismounts [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Carmen Boullosa (Author), Geoff Hargreaves (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2003

Cleopatra Dismounts is an imagined reconstruction of the life of the Egyptian queen, called Queen of Kings by her subjects and widely said to be the incarnation of the goddess Isis. In the opening section, dying in Marc Antony's arms, Cleopatra bewails the ignominious end to her larger-than-life career through the political world of ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Mediterranean. But is this really the true Cleopatra? Through the intervention of Cleopatra's scribe and informer Diomedes, Boullosa creates two previous Cleopatras, and in effect two deliriously wild other lives for the young monarch — a girl escaping the intrigues of royal society, fleeing in the back of a horse cart to Ascalon, to disguise herself and take up residence with a band of pirates; and the young queen who is carried across the sea on the back of a magical bull, to live among the Amazons and become part of their society, learning their battle techniques and stories of love. Magical, multifaceted, and rippling with luminous imagination, Cleopatra Dismounts recalls Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry and confirms Carmen Boullosa as an important international voice.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Mexican author Boullosa plays with the life and myth of Cleopatra in her third novel to be published in the U.S., following Leaving Tabasco (2001) and They're Cows, We're Pigs (1997). Drawing on the writings of several ancient authors, including Sophocles, Cicero, and Virgil, Boullosa presents a Cleopatra different from the traditional, historical portrait, which came to us via the Romans, who had much reason to dislike her. Boullosa offers three possibilities, leaving us to decide which defines her best. Was she the lover of Marc Antony, too distraught to remain alive after his death? Or the young girl who disguised herself and went to live with a band of pirates in order to escape from her royal duties? Or a woman who learned the art of love and war from Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, and her tribe of women warriors? Those wanting a straightforward fictional biography of Cleopatra should look to Margaret George's Memoirs of Cleopatra (1997), but readers open to an imaginative, sensual, and poetic peek into the life of this fascinating woman will enjoy Boullosa's visions. Nancy Pearl
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

Carmen Boullosa has established herself as one of Latin America´s most original voices, with a gift for illuminating unseen dimensions of familiar stories and the extraordinary outsiders who inhabited them all along. In "Cleopatra Dismounts" she has found perhaps her perfect subject, as this enchanting an audacious writer takes on one of the history´s most legendary women -a powerful queen in a world of men, both lauded and vilified by literature ever since. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• ISBN-10: 0802117538
• ASIN: B000HWYJ30
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,470,695 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Surprised I'm the first to review this book!, February 11, 2010

By 

M. Mistretta "book nerd." (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cleopatra Dismounts (Hardcover)

First, apologies if there are typos I don't catch. The S key on my keyboard has been acting up lately.

CLEOPATRA DISMOUNTS is a fine and ethereal work of writing, walking a line somewhere between straightforward historical fiction and the finest of literary experimentation. It's a short and easy to read novel, if you appreciate literary fiction. If you are a greater fan of a much more plain-faced historical, this may not be the book for you.

Boullosa (trans. Hargreaves) paints vivid, startling pictures with words. This is a book that looks into the emotional life of the last Pharaoh of Egypt, showing three possible alternate Cleopatras. At the beginning of the novel, we understand that Cleopatra is dying in her lover's arms, and thus, the alternate memories she reflects upon can be taken as hallucinatory memories created by an expiring brain. But they might also reflect the Cleopatra that wanted to exist, that may have existed if things had gone just a little differently. The text is further filtered through the perspective of a scribe translating Cleopatra's biography, as written by his master, a historian who knew Cleopatra personally. Thus, the entire story is seen through a strange veil -- a scribe putting his own spin on a biographer's work about a woman's dying "memories." Cleopatra is hardly laid in her tomb, and already her legend is running away with itself.

Boullosa's prose is intoxicating and real, and her three imagined lives of Cleopatra are poignant. Definitely worth reading for any fan of historical or literary fiction.