17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A little self congratulatory but still interesting, January 22, 2006
This review is from: Later Chapters of My Life: The Lost Memoir of Queen Marie of Romania (Hardcover)
The autobiography of Marie, Queen of Romania, is well written, but somewhat florid and self congratulatory in its attempts to describe her feelings about events, particularly her appointment as the "face of Romania" at the Paris talks that brought the end of world war one in 1919. Her style is best when she is most lacking in self consciousness. Her estimates of the various players at the peace conference are penetrating and probably correct. Certainly her description of the war torn countryside of Europe through which she passed are graphic and emotionally moving visions.
The book is probably most charming in its depiction of the family relationships within her own immediate household and in her extended family. The characterizations, especially of Edward and Queen Mary of England, provide a much more intimate picture of the royal family than most biographical and historical works are able to do.
That this is significant to an understanding of the period is very evident when one realizes how throughly interrelated were all of the royal families of Europe. For them, the world war was not just a political issue, it was a family feud. Most of the contenders, with the exception of the United States, were countries lead by various descendants of Queen Victoria. In short, almost everyone on both sides of the conflict were cousins, aunts, uncles, even parents. That the conflict lead to emotional agony for many is certain, as the account of Maries' last meeting with her mother Alexandra shows. The authoress herself realizes that the world has changed, that her mother has little place in it, and at the end of her own life, that she herself has little place in it.
What she doesn't seem to realize is that the war was actually the death knell of the monarchical form of government and lifestyle as it had been practiced. Hereditary rule was being replaced by other ways of selecting governors. Marie's amusement over the American volunteers and their curiosity about a "real" queen reveals this blinkered point of view. Her use of the terms "peasants" in respect to the rural population of her country and her patronizing attitude toward them reveals the pitfalls into which this ancient form of government was headed and into which the Russian branch of "the Family" had already fallen.
That Queen Marie was still functioning in the ancient mode of monarchy herself is apparent by the pride with which she recounts the connections she arranged for her children with other royal houses, arrangements which would hardly last much past her own life. The photo of the "Three Queens and the Infante of Spain"--Marie, two of her daughters and her younger sister Beatrice--is a little sad. The emotionally drained, almost tragic face of Beatrice, already facing issues in Spain, is virtually a prophecy for the three smiling queens in the future. Knowing as one does the end of the story, one can hardly be unmoved by the tender family scene the photo portrays: the last happy days.
One has the sense that the lady was enough aware of world affairs and of the ways of the world to know already at the end of her life that Europe was again headed for a major war. Though she probably penned these last memoirs to preserve them from her son Carol II's interference, she probably also wrote them as a coda for the war through which she herself had lived and in which she had taken an active part.
She certainly seems to have been abundantly aware of the failings of the 1919 peace accords even as they were being pounded out and signed. Most who study the two world wars as history congratulate themselves over seeing that the seeds of the second were sown in the first; but then, hindsight is 20-20. For the Queen, however, this knowledge was foresight. It was as if she alone could see, at the very beginning, that Europe had set itself up for a second great war by its own unwillingness to forgive.
This is perhaps the very point at which the change in the political intellect changed. The cardinal point at which Monarchy died and Democracy/Socialism begins. The family feud was settled by outsiders, so-to-speak, making punishment and reparation the rules of the day. Family cannot afford to do this. Family must remember that it depends on all of its members, that it has interests in common, that hurt feelings have to be addressed. Democracy/Socialism knows no "feelings." Rule by the Demos-Athens aside-is a relatively new phenomenon, and it still has to struggle to learn what thousands of years of monarchy had learned the hard way. Marie is painfully aware that the terms of the peace agreement would not work, that it would cause anger and hate, and ultimately war. The years of peace were only going to be a period of catching political breath before the fight began again in ernest and with more ferocity. The so-called Great War would just be round one.
My only complaint is that the authoress did not describe more events and more people. Much of the book is a repetitious self congratulation, an awareness of her place in history. This leads to saying the same thing in a dozen different ways which I found frustrating. The prose style moves along more smoothly when the author is focusing on others and events. Admittedly the book is an autobiography and the author a queen not a jounalist, but it could have used more focus. She doesn't really hit her stride until about a third of the way through the book, but by the final chapter one is wanting to hear more.
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