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A Novel of Marie Antoinette
by Sena Jeter Naslund
Book Reviewed by:From the lush gardens of Versailles to the lights and gaiety of Paris, the verdant countryside of France, and finally the stark and terrifying isolation of a prison cell, Naslund brings the 18th Century, and Marie Antoinette, vividly to life.
"Like everyone, I am born naked."
With this opening line of Naslund's compelling new novel, a very human
Marie Antoinette invites readers to live her story as she herself
experiences it. From the lush gardens of Versailles to the lights and
gaiety of Paris, the verdant countryside of France, and finally the
stark and terrifying isolation of a prison cell, the young queen's life
is joyful, poignant, and harrowing by turns. As her world of
unprecedented royal splendor crumbles, the charming Marie Antoinette
matures into a heroine of inspiring stature, one whose nobility arises
not from the circumstance of her birth but from her courageous spirit.
Marie Antoinette was a child of fourteen when her mother, the
Empress of Austria, arranged for her to leave her family and her
country to become the wife of the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future
King of France. Coming of age in the most public of arenas, the young
queen embraces her new family and the French people, and she is
embraced in return. Eager to be a good wife and strong queen, she shows
her new husband nothing but love and encouragement, though he
repeatedly fails to consummate their marriage and in doing so, fails to
give her the thing she—and the people of France—desire most: a child
and an heir to the throne.
Deeply disappointed and isolated in her own intimate circle apart
from the social life of the court, the queen allows herself to remain
ignorant of the country's growing economic and political crises. She
entrusts her soul to her women friends, her music teacher, her
hairdresser, the ambassador from Austria, and a certain Swedish count
so handsome that admirers label him "the Picture." When her innocent
and well-chaperoned pilgrimage to watch the sun rise is viciously
misrepresented in satiric pamphlets as a drunken orgy, the people begin
to turn against her. Poor harvests, bitter winters, war debts, and
poverty precipitate rebellion and revenge as the royal family and many
nobles are caught up in a murderous time known as "the Terror."
With penetrating insight into new historical scholarship and with
wondrous narrative skill, Naslund offers an intimate, fresh, and
dramatic re-creation of this compelling woman that goes beyond popular
myth. Abundance
reveals a compassionate and spontaneous Marie Antoinette who rejected
the formality and rigid protocol of the court; an enchanting and
tenderhearted outsider who was loved by her adopted homeland and people
until she became the target of revolutionary cruelty and violence; a
dethroned queen whose depth of character sustained her in even the
worst of times.
Once again, Sena Jeter Naslund has shed new light on an important
moment of historical change and made that time as real to us as the one
we are living now. Exquisitely detailed, beautifully written,
heartbreaking and powerful, Abundance is a novel that is impossible to put down.
An Island in the Rhine River, May
1770
Like
everyone, I am born naked.
I do not refer to my actual birth, mercifully
hidden in the silk folds of memory, but to my birth as a citizen of
France--
citoyenne, they would say.
Having shed all my clothing, I stand in a room on an island in the middle of
the Rhine River
--naked. My bare feet occupy for this moment a spot considered to be
neutral between beloved Austria
and France. The sky blue silk of
my discarded skirt wreathes my ankles, and I fancy I am standing barefooted in
a puddle of pretty water.
My chest is as flat as a shield, marked only by two
pink rosebuds of nipples. I refuse to be afraid. In the months since I became
fourteen, I've watched these pleasant rosebuds becoming a bit plump and pinker.
Now the fingers and hands of my attendants are stretching toward my neck to
remove a smooth circlet of Austrian pearls.
I try to picture the French boy, whom I have never
seen, extending large ...
Marie Antoinette has been much maligned over the last couple of centuries; but many recent books, most notably Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette (non-fiction) have gone a long way to putting flesh back on to the caricature. Naslund adds value by allowing Marie Antoinette to speak for herself, giving us access to the secret thoughts and feelings (albeit hypothetical) of the young queen - territory that a biographer must be wary of entering...continued
Full Review
(558 words)
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Sena Jeter Naslund was born in Birmingham, Alabama; her mother taught music and her father, who died when she was 15, was a doctor; she has two older brothers. In high school she played cello with the Alabama Pops Orchestra. She won a music scholarship to the University of Alabama but turned it down in favor of studying writing at Birmingham-Southern College. While she was there she attended the Breadloaf Writers' Conference - a two week series of lectures, workshops and classes (since 1926, the conference has been held annually at the Breadloaf Inn, Middlebury, Vermont and claims to be the oldest writers' conference in the USA). After graduating from Birmingham-Southern, she was accepted at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at...
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