Napoleon Symphony

Author(s) : BURGESS Anthony
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Napoleon Symphony

First published in 1974.
 
The writer and composer Anthony Burgess was fascinated with Napoleon from a very early age. In 1971 he wrote the beginnings of a novel based on Napoleon's life that Stanley Kubrick hoped to use as the basis for a film. The novel took the formal structure of Beethoven's Third Symphony (the Eroica, originally dedicated to Napoleon before his invasion of Switzerland), with each section of the narrative corresponding to a passage in the score.
In the event Burgess's text was not used, as Kubrick felt Burgess's freedom with the chronology of events confused the drama of the story, and that Burgess's comic vision of Napoleon fell short of his heroic stature. But Burgess went on to develop his text into one of his most important and experimental works, Napoleon Symphony.

“Burgess concentrates the bulk of his narrative on the man himself, and we share his bubbling, overflowing perception of a world that seems a step or two behind him until the end. This is a book of scenes, locations, evocations, conversations, anecdotes, jokes and dreams, in which the facts are scattered among the fictions for decoration. There is a lot of consistently appalling poetry. There is a lot of dialogue, and at its best the whole thing is like a briskly edited and compelling comedy-drama. It rattles ahead at pace, covering ground at times so quickly that you feel a little dizzy, in a pleasingly impressed way. Italy, Egypt, Paris, Russia: they all whizz by, and the vertiginous sense of a soldier barging his way into history, and of a novelist tumbling after him, is an old-fashioned sort of reading pleasure” (extract from Keith Ridgway's review in the Irish Times: “A rousing performance”)

Year of publication :
2012
Place and publisher :
London, Serpent's Tail
Number of pages :
390
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