Word: burgesses
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...novel itself is divided into four movements corresponding to the parts of Beethoven's Third Symphony, "The Eroica." (Beethoven originally dedicated "The Eroica " to Napoleon, but tore up the dedication after the First Consul of France crowned himself Emperor.) At times the Burgess Bonaparte resembles a cross between Charles de Gaulle and Douglas MacArthur. At times he is an 18th century Mafia capo trying to manage overextended holdings and control his greedy relatives. Burgess seeks to evoke the heaving spirit of the Napoleonic age by rouging (and noiring) the historical facts with catchy dialogue and fantasy. As he points...
...broader screen of history, Burgess gets his effects by balancing the horrors of war with some of the absurdities of political power and private weaknesses. Napoleon is at times almost lovable, particularly when he discovers that the people of France are so blinded by the myth of Bonaparte that they do not even recognize him when he chooses to walk the streets as an ordinary citizen. Burgess also locates Napoleon's own blind spots. On drama, for example: "Tragedy must never have chairs on the stage. Tragic characters never sit down." And the Emperor's effort to abolish...
...Burgess grants Napoleon both genius and idealism, but he has great fun exploring the Emperor's lack of moral sensitivity and aesthetic judgment. As the torch carrier of the Enlightenment, a kind of social engineer who believed man was perfectible through political institutions, Burgess's Napoleon ignores the intransigent nature of evil...
...Burgess, the Christian moralist, appears to agree. His reasons are worked out in a fugue of ideas at the book's end where the exiled, cancerous-perhaps even dead-Napoleon encounters a mysterious female apparition. Since she coldly puts Napoleon in his place, she may well be Clio, the Muse of history...
...Awwk! Awwk!" sings Anthony Burgess in a loud, hoarse baritone. "Those E-flat major chords get the reader awake." Then in deep, funereal tones, quoting from his own book, he continues: "There he lies/ Ensanguinated tyrant/ O bloody, bloody tyrant/ See/ How the sin within/ Doth incarnadine/ His skin/ From the shin to the chin." "Perhaps," he adds, "Knopf should have given away a free record with every copy...