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Napoleon Symphony, Anthony Burgess, Profile Books, 2012, 1847658911, 9781847658913, 384 pages. A grand and tragi-comic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, this novel unteases and reweaves Napoleon's life - from the first great days of his campaigns in 1796 to exile and death on St. Helena a quarter of a century later. Burgess' Bonaparte is a cuckold, afflicted with heartburn and halitosis while enacting a wily seduction of Tsar Alexander, conquering Egypt and crowning himself Emperor. Witty, sardonic, intellectual, Napoleon Symphony is Burgess at his most challenging and inventive. In creating a novel based on a musical form, Burgess is playing with structure, from the grand, ambitious shape of the novel itself, through to the finer composition of each sentence.. DOWNLOAD HERE Any Old Iron , Lynda Page, Nov 25, 2010, Fiction, 332 pages. Kelly McCallan has more than her fair share of worries. 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Burgess's Bonaparte is a cuckold suffering from heartburn and halitosis who is portrayed as a wily seducer of Tsar Alexander I of Russia. His conquest of Egypt is a central theme of the novel, which presents a comedic but detailed and revealing portrait of an Arab and Muslim society under occupation by a Christian Western power. Beethoven had originally dedicated his Third Symphony to Bonaparte. But when he learned that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, he tore the dedication from the manuscript. When the work was published it was titled, Sinfonia eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d'un grand'Uomo (Heroic symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man), known to posterity as the Eroica. The novel is dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, who had directed the film adaption of Burgess's earlier novel, A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick himself had intended to make a biographical film about Bonaparte, but was dissatisfied with his own screenplay. They corresponded, then met in December 1971. Burgess suggested to Kubrick that the structure of the film could be based on the Eroica symphony, and was asked by Kubrick to write a novel based on this concept to serve as the basis for a screenplay. Using his own knowledge of symphonic structure, Burgess based his writing closely on the sequence of Beethoven's work, with Napoleon's funeral followed by a resurrection. In June 1972 he sent the first section to Kubrick, who responded with regret that the treatment was unsuitable for a film, writing, "the [manuscript] is not a work that can help me make a film about the life of Napoleon." Freed from these constraints, Burgess developed the work into an experimental novel. He reworked the material into a stage play called Napoleon Rising for the Royal Shakespeare Company, but it remained unperformed in his lifetime. It was first performed in a radio adaptation for the BBC on 2 December 2012.[1] It's a mystery how this masterpiece came to be so misunderstood. Burgess' favorite among his novels (and mine), this work is a tour de force: a novel about Napoleon in four movements that follow the structure of Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony (originally dedicated to Bonaparte; then, when Boney crowned himself Emperor, re-dedicated "to the memory of a fallen hero"). Burgess has reconciled the repetitive, cyclic nature of music with the novel's need for narrative forward motion brilliantly, yet his text mirrors the musical structure with uncanny detail -- both short- and long-term. Tempo, texture, key changes, rhythm -- all are there in the book. (For rhythm, check out the beginning of the third chapter while listening to the Eroica's scherzo.) The true miracle of this book, however, is that independently of its stylistic conceit, it is profoundly insightful and profoundly moving. Try reading the second chapter -- counterpart to Beethoven's Funeral March movement, and describing the retreat from Moscow -- without emotion. Or the final chapter, about Napoleon's exile on St. Helena, his surprising friendship with his English gaoler's young daughter, and his death. (Here, Burgess replicates Beethoven's theme-and-variations structure with passages in different literary styles: Austen, Henry James, et al., yet without any feeling of pastiche.) Musicians resented the book because they thought it trivialized Beethoven by "making" his symphony "be about" Napoleon. Literary types resented it -- well, probably because they could never bring off such a feat, themselves. Or because they thought a book about Napoleon should be at least four times as long. Try this book, enjoy it, and be grateful for such a gift of words. As someone who has read all Anthony Burgess' novels, I must say that while Napoleon Symphony has it moments, it falls considerably short of his better achievements (Clockwork, Nothing Like the Sun, Earthly Powers, Dead Man in Deptford). Casting about the Internet for other reviews, it seems this work draws raves or rants: Raves from those transported by Burgess' linguistic felicity, rants from those overwhelmed by it (or scandalized by his liberties with good ol' Ludwig van). A grand and tragi-comic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, this novel unteases and reweaves Napoleon's life - from the first great days of his campaigns in 1796 to exile and death on St. Helena a quarter of a century later. Burgess' Bonaparte is a cuckold, afflicted with heartburn and halitosis while enacting a wily seduction of Tsar Alexander, conquering Egypt and crowning himself Emperor. Witty, sardonic, intellectual, Napoleon Symphony is Burgess at his most challenging and inventive. In creating a novel based on a musical form, Burgess is playing with structure, from the grand, ambitious shape of the novel itself, through to the finer composition of each sentence. Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was a novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. He is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, but altogether he wrote thirty-three novels, twenty-five works of non-fiction, two volumes of autobiography, three symphonies, more than 150 other musical works, reams of journalism and much more.He was born in Manchester, England and grew up in Harpurhey and Moss Side, went to school in Rusholme, and studied at Manchester University. He lived in Malaya, Malta, Monaco, Italy and the US amongst other places, and is still widely read all over the world. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. Criminally out of print, this is Burgess at his best. As good (if not better) than Earthly Powers, and considerably superior to any of the Enderby books. Napoleon Symphony is subtitled 'A Novel in Four Movements', with a portion each for his victories as a general, his rise to First Consul and Emperor, his decline, and finally his exile. The shifts in pace and tone for each movement are wonderful, as are the verse forms which Burgess uses to cover a mass of historical detail with playfulness and brevity. The result is a novel which achieves the balance between historical context and individual experience better than any I have read. Napoleon himself is an extraordinary force - a tight bundle of angst and energy, possessed by his purposes and destinies. Comical too, with his halitosis, his meandering lines of conversation, his bursts of ego and half-baked philosophy. The sections on the Russia campaign flow over with vivid atrocity and panic, the Paris scenes with farce, the exile with wistfulness and even some tenderness. An epic drama charting Napoleon Bonaparte's meteoric rise in the early years of the French revolution, set against his tumultuous relationship with Josephine. Written by Anthony Burgess but never performed in his lifetime and now adapted for radio by Anjum Malik. Part of Radio 3's Napoleon season, marking 200 years since his famous retreat from Moscow. In which Burgess asks - did Napoleon have to exist, or would it have been better all round for someone to have invented him? And then has an admittedly superfluous go at doing just that. I suspect it would appeal more to those with at least a little Bonapartist to them, whereas I've only ever regarded the little shit as a prototype for the breed of hypocrite dictator of which Europe and indeed the world has seen all too much since.