Word: napoleons
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...NAPOLEON SYMPHONY by ANTHONY BURGESS 365 pages. Knopf...
...riches, a kind of conspicuous consumption of exotic plot thickeners, linguistic games, disturbing tragicomedy, Manichaean trampoline acts and Christian and mythological symbolism. Thematically speaking, anything goes-as Burgess demonstrated three years ago in MF, a novel of contemporary incest based on an Algonquin Indian myth. In his latest offering, Napoleon Symphony, the author, who is also a serious composer, has reached for everything from kazoos to pipe organs. The result is a mock epic about the career of Napoleon Bonaparte that sometimes reads like Dickens, sometimes like Tennyson and Wordsworth, with an occasional gash of Gerard Manley Hopkins' gold...
...Rouault, and photographs of Malraux's own beloved cats. Once a chain-smoker, he has given up cigarettes and alcohol and looks younger than he has in years. "Did you know," he asked, "that the Mona Lisa hung in the bathrooms of Francois I, Louis XIV and Napoleon?* Francois I, well, that was normal because he bought it from Leonardo. It was not so logical in the case of Louis XIV, because in his reign the great painter was Raphael. And in Napoleon's day, Leonardo was thought of as a second-rate painter...
This is a familiar argument on the part of the French: East's is East's and West's is West's; the Soviet Union and the U.S. are seeking, as did Napoleon and Russian Emperor Alexander III, to divide up Europe into spheres of influence. The French fear is widely shared...
...became president, "The first thing I did was to merge publicity and sales. I must have fired a cast of hundreds in the process, but in the end we had a tight, clean operation in which all roads led directly into my office." If that corporate chart sounds like Napoleon's plan for the highways of France, Yablans would not deny it. "It's easy to be humble if you were born a prince. I came from a ghetto...