Customer Reviews

Cleopatra Dismounts

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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.