Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday November 19, 2010
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CLEOPATRA: A Life
Stacy Schiff
Little, Brown
ISBN 978 0 316 00192 2
368 pages
$29.99
Reviewed by Marie Arana, a writer at large for The Washington Post. She is also a Distinguished Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress. She can be reached at aranam(at symbol)washpost.com.
She was a child of incest, a born goddess, a queen by 18 -- and possibly the richest magnate in the Mediterranean before she turned 20. By 21, she was cavorting in bed with the most powerful emperor of her day, all in the service of her country. She married her brothers when she needed them, murdered them when she didn't. In time, she became a mother of four. But family concerns never crimped her. The fathers of her children were always somewhere else, on the other side of a sea, already married. Which left time to raise armies, build fleets, run with the big boys. She was Cleopatra, last of the great Egyptian pharaohs. Isn't history fun?
If you think two millennia of dusty research and hoary legend have told us all we need to know about this woman, you're in for a surprise. Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of three highly praised biographies -- of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Vera Nabokov and Benjamin Franklin -- has dug through the earliest sources on Cleopatra, sorted through myth and misapprehension, tossed out the chaff of gossip, and delivered up a spirited life.
First, she was not Egyptian; she was Greek. She was not dark-skinned; more like honey. If she and her ancestors murdered one another, they considered it no crime; if they practiced incest, there was never a word for it. She was hardly beautiful by Hollywood standards -- no Angelina Jolie, mind you. She was tiny, birdlike, with a pronounced hooked nose. She spoke numerous languages and was a gifted orator. She liked sex, but liked a good conversation better. She was no nymphomaniac: It is likely that Julius Caesar deflowered her. And, no, she wasn't delivered to him in a rug, as Elizabeth Taylor was delivered to Richard Burton; she came in a sturdy bag, tied with string, slung over a Sicilian's shoulder.
Schiff is especially skilled at limning the social contours of the story. The Romans were warriors, hooked on conquest, hard on women. To make wealth they needed to build empire. The Egyptians of Alexandria, on the other hand, were cultured, inventive, masters of the intellect. They built a vast library to prove it. They were astronomers for centuries before Rome even existed. Theirs was a city of mechanical marvels, and it boasted among its novelties "automatic doors and hydraulic lifts, hidden treadmills and coin-operated machines." But Alexandria was also a paradise of perfumes, a repository of the arts, an agricultural wonder -- a center that could feed and amuse its people in equal measure. If Cleopatra had needed to, she single-handedly could have fed all of Rome.
The differences between Rome and Egypt were nowhere so acute as in the ways they treated women. In Egypt, the females negotiated their marriages. They inherited alongside brothers, owned property independently. If a husband was financially irresponsible, the law sided with the wife and children. If Cleopatra needed a role model from among her ancestors, she could have chosen from any number of ruthlessly powerful queens. As Herodotus put it, Egypt was a country where a woman urinated standing up. In Rome, on the other hand -- even in palaces -- a woman was for horsetrading and making babies.
Nevertheless, Egypt relied on Rome for protection. As war-loving Rome hungrily gobbled its way through the Mediterranean, Egypt lost one neighbor after another. By the time Cleopatra inherited her father's throne, she was surrounded by Caesar. In order to consolidate her power against her brother, she appealed to Caesar himself. (Enter: muscular Sicilian, large sturdy bag.)
Schiff has a magpie's eye for detail; her Cleopatra, as a result, is hung with shiny bits of history. To wit: An infatuated Caesar struts through Rome in tall, scarlet-red boots to visit his mistress; Cleopatra cooks up recipes for baldness (equal parts burnt mice, burnt rag, burnt horses' teeth ...) as handily as she might for contraception (salt, mouse excrement, honey and resin); Marc Antony likes to drink a little too much, and he's a master at crashing weddings; and, in a scene only a modern-day working mother could appreciate, Cleopatra sails to Jerusalem to negotiate with Herod, even as she is large with Marc Antony's child. But for all its splendor of detail, Schiff's book is a model of concision, and its brisk, vividly written chapters move with a swiftness the Nile never enjoyed.
Even as she recounts Cleopatra's exploits -- from bed to high sea -- Schiff is careful to separate what is likely to be true from what is likely to be twaddle. Well aware that most of the sources on which she must rely were written in biblical times, 50 B.C. to A.D. 150 -- anywhere from two decades to two centuries after Cleopatra was born -- she informs us whether she is quoting Plutarch or Cicero or Dio in her characterizations, and, in the process, these thoroughly feisty, opinionated bards, too, become part of the tale.
What fascinates Schiff, and fascinates us as we move through the story, is how unfair history has been to Cleopatra. Despite Caesar and Marc Antony's rampant sexual profligacy with uncountable wives, concubines and passing assignations, it is (serially monogamous) Cleopatra who is remembered as the panting seductress. Despite the reality that it was her staggering wealth and powerful fleets that Rome desperately needed, literature reduces her to a marginal exotic with a few womanly wiles. And despite her remarkable command of languages, razor-sharp mind and transcendent abilities as a ruler -- "every bit Caesar's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist" -- it is the libidinous queen who lives on.
Perhaps, as Schiff says, too many poets and playwrights have spoken for her: "We have been putting words in her mouth for two thousand years. In one of the busiest afterlives in history she has gone on to become an asteroid, a video game, a cliche, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club." If Shakespeare once attested to her infinite variety, little did he know what half a millennium more would do. To add further irony, the publisher of this book announces brightly that none other than Angelina Jolie will star in Schiff's book's Hollywood adaptation.
Make no mistake, "Cleopatra" will drive some historians cuckoo: It conflates, guzzles centuries in a single sentence. It's too in love with the slick phrase. It has hiccups of repetition a more careful editor might have eradicated.
But it is a great, glorious spree of a story. In it, a formidable queen with brains, resources and a talent for having her way is caught in a shape-shifting moment over which she had no control. Struggling against the tide, as Schiff tells it, "she convinced her people that a twilight was a dawn and -- with all her might -- struggled to make it so."
She was a politician.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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YEARS OF RED DUST: Stories of Shanghai
Qiu Xiaolong
St. Martin's
ISBN 978 0 312 62809 3
227 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Gaiutra Bahadur. Bahadur is at work on a nonfiction book, "Coolie Woman."
It just so happened that Qiu Xiaolong was in St. Louis when the Chinese government massacred pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. A T.S. Eliot translator, Qiu had won a grant to conduct research at Washington University, founded by Eliot's grandfather. Because of that chance timing, his life diverted dramatically. Publicly sympathetic to the protesters, Qiu never made it back to China, except as a visitor. Instead, he became a U.S. citizen and a novelist in English, the author of a popular mystery series about a Shanghai police detective named Inspector Chen.
Outcomes like his own, the accidental kind, befall many of the characters in "Years of Red Dust," Qiu's witty, evocative book of interrelated short stories just published in English. (The collection is already a best-seller in France and Germany.) The contingency of history threads through the tales, which Qui presents as the evening talk among residents of a lane in Shanghai from the communist takeover in 1949 to 2005.
In one story, a political prisoner freed shortly after Mao's Cultural Revolution wanders into a bookstore to find copies of the tome that landed him in jail -- selling for 315 times the original cost. He sits under a poster of a girl in a bikini. It's a changed world, as Qiu's characters frequently observe: A counterrevolutionary has been restored to society and freedom, and socialist values have been revised to admit price markups and bikini girls.
This ex-prisoner, Jiang Xiaoming, had written about -- appropriately enough -- the contingency of history. His rehabilitated book gives an account of a Jing Dynasty emperor who had so many concubines that he let a goat decide which one he would sleep with each night. But the goat always stopped at the 311th concubine's door -- not because she was beautiful or because it was Heaven's will, as the emperor believed. The concubine had sprinkled saltwater on her doorstep, which the animal stooped to lick, altering bloodlines of succession and the course of history. Qiu's scholar concludes: "The moral is clear: a goat is a goat."
And so it would seem for the residents of Red Dust Lane, who meet with ironic reversals of fate as China evolves from communism to a curious accommodation with capitalism. An expensive, foreign cap wins a university professor both a girlfriend and tenure. A socialist stalwart who marches through the lane with a bullhorn, denouncing "class enemies," ends up working for petty cash at a privately run snack shop. A Korean War nurse, elevated to martyrdom when thought dead, returns to the lane, alive after all, to suspicion and loneliness. Qiu presents their turns of fortune dryly, with an appreciation for the absurd and a sense, too, for when the absurd is also truly tragic.
The author's Inspector Chen mysteries have been censored in China. No mere police procedurals, they wriggle inside and beneath Shanghai, observing the underground places where members of the Chinese mafia mingle with politicians. I can't say how "Years of Red Dust" will fare with the censors. The government's effort to silence Liu Xiaobo, the winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, doesn't give much reason for optimism.
Corrupt party cadres appear in the margins of "Years of Red Dust." And, as with the historian who got too clever with the Jing Dynasty goat, Qiu's sharp eye for the arbitrary could be interpreted as an indirect challenge to the regime. If fortune can be random in his stories, so can the government. An agent of the state elevates a factory worker into a bard of the common man, literally putting a poem in his mouth, after stumbling across him on his lunch break. A factory manager is forced to wear a blackboard with his name crossed out, a common way to shame class enemies during the Cultural Revolution. Blackboards featured as part of the landscape of state control, and they feature in Qiu's book too. Each story begins with a newsletter, chalked on a blackboard at the entrance to Red Dust Lane, giving the party line on events in the People's Republic during the year the story is set. These bits of propaganda serve as a foil for the honesty of Qiu's tales.
But once past his critique of the Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1976, Qiu focuses more on the moral compromises wrought by China's growing materialism than on the government's resistance to political change. He portrays -- without sentimentality -- the ordinary man adrift in a freer market, not the hero fighting for free expression.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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