The Death of Napoleon / Simon Leys ; translated by Patricia Clancy and the author.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Leys, Simon, 1935-2014.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Standardized Title:

Mort de Napoléon. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821--Fiction.

Napoleon.

Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821.

Genre:

Fiction.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copies 1 & 2)

Physical Description:

129 pages ; 21 cm

Edition:

First Picador USA edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Picador USA, 2002.

Summary:

"Ladies and gentlemen, alas! The Emperor is dead". The news goes out across Europe, but in fact Napoleon has not died. By means of an ingenious escape, he has returned to the Continent, leaving an impersonator on St. Helena, and it is this double who has unexpectedly and very problematically passed away. Traveling incognito, the Emperor experiences a series of bizarre adventures which bring him face to face with the myth of Napoleon as it is disconcertingly played out in everyday life. After a visit to Waterloo and near-arrest at the French border, he eventually arrives in Paris, where he falls in with some veteran Bonapartists and visits an asylum where most of the inmates are laboring under the mistaken impression that they are he. Will Napoleon ever recapture his true identity? Who, in the end, is he, now that "the Emperor is dead"? Simon Leys's truculent, delightful fable poses these and other questions in a rare work of fiction that is continually surprising and effervescent.

Notes:

Translation of: La mort de Napoléon.

ISBN:

031242177X

9780312421779

OCLC:

50587050