Peter Brooks (1) (1938–)

The Humanities and Public Life is a minefield for a reviewer. The “ethics of reading”, the basis of the discussion, examines how we choose, collect, interpret, react, evaluate and are changed by texts. The cobweb of possibilities, and the intensity of the light shined on it, are intimidating.

Not to mention the quality of the participants. This book is the print version of a symposium put together by Peter Brooks of Princeton, after being, shall we say “moved” by the Torture Memos of show more the Bush administration. He invited his peers from Ivy League-type schools to be the audience and the participants. Everyone got to comment on everyone else’s contributions. The result is thorough, thoughtful, debatable, and unresolved. All good things.

At base it’s a pretty defensive argument for the humanities – how to justify their continuing existence in a time of cutbacks, how to make them more pertinent, more effective, more mission critical, more relevant. It diverges to all kinds of tangents as the learned participants snap off weak limbs and run with them.

The whole debate is put into strikingly sharp relief by William Germano, who came to academia (Cooper Union) via publishing (Columbia, Routledge). Unlike many of his co-commenters who deal with some aspect of someone else’s contribution, Germano takes on the entire topic - head on. His analysis is clear and pointed. His conclusion is that we might be asking the wrong question. Perhaps it is writing, not reading that needs to be ethically self conscious, because the writer will change the reader, for better or for worse, correctly or incorrectly. He puts the entire argument into clear perspective by taking it to a different level.

The best defense of the humanities comes from Jonathan Lear (Chicago), who, trying out for reporter at the Yale Daily News, interviewed the head of the fraternity where rumor had it they were physically branding initiates. The fraternity head said “It’s not as bad as you think.” And it turns out, that has been his m.o. ever since. Oh, his name was George W. Bush, the same Bush behind the Torture Memos that led to the symposium. Lear asks how the world might have been different had Bush been taught some right from wrong, had some dean become indignant over this activity, had the humanities taken a more direct role in forming students’ ability to judge ethically.

The result is nothing - no final statement, no recommendations, no follow-on symposia. But we are left with a book that challenges on numerous levels and from numerous angles. show less

I had high hopes for this book, but it failed to live up to even the most modest of my expectations. In 1840, it was arranged that an expedition be taken up to exhume Napoleon Bonaparte's body from his exiled home of St. Helena's Island, and bury him in Paris, twenty years after his death. This is the story that the book bases itself on, though loosely.

"The Emperor's Body" would have been more aptly titled something like "Idiots in Love," or "Pointless Romance." This is really all that I got show more out of it.

Henry Beyle, better known as the famous French author Stendhal, takes up most of the book. He is involved with the mission to fetch Napoleon's body, so you would think that this is what we see him doing for most of the story, right? Wrong. He spends the first third of the book reminiscing about his experiences with a lover he has in Sicily, the other third longing for a new girl named Amelia, and the other third playing the "She loves me, she loves me not" game. Though the author constantly reminded us of Beyle's age (around forty, as I remember), he acts like a silly teenage boy in love for the first time.
His lover, to use the word flatteringly, is the young, beautiful Amelia Curial. She is being pressured to marry by some, and urged to take a lover by others. Confused and inexperienced, she tells Beyle she wants to be with him, but does not exactly say whether she means as a husband or as a lover. We never really find out.
Amelia was sickening, and I disliked her strongly. She toys with the affections of two men at once, all the while utterly undecided about what to do, and leads both to believe that they hold some claim over her. Though it sounds malicious, she really is just a senseless girl.
At the end, after everything is decided, she says to herself that now she "knows enough about love." So she considers herself experienced now? In trickery and stupidity, perhaps.
I know that this is sounding pretty harsh, but I literally could not have endured another ten pages of these awful characters.

The real piece of the story that fascinated me when I read the description was the idea of Napoleon impacting people's lives so strongly, even from the grave. I have been stumbling across quite a lot of books about the Bonapartes and the Napoleonic Wars lately (just by chance), so I thought that this one would be a perfect book to end the sequence.
While I was forced to listen to Beyle moaning about Amelia, saying he wants her but can't take her because of what a good man he is, and Amelia saying one day she loves Beyle more than anything and the next day unsure if she has feelings for him at all (ugh!), I looked in vain for Napoleon.
He was not the focus of the story at all, but rather an interesting back story that should have been made more prominent. The only part of this book that I actually enjoyed (for a few pages, that is) is when they opened the coffin and looked at the dead emperor. These were the sort of scenes and details I was hoping for in this book!

This was a very large disappointment, and the worst Early Reviewer's book I have received to date. Please don't bother with it. show less

Summary: In 1840, an expedition was launched to reclaim the body of Napoleon from his island prison of St. Helena and return it to France. This expedition was headed up by the young aristocrat Philippe de Rohan-Chabot. Philippe leaves behind in Paris his love Amelia Curial, a mercurial young woman who scorns marriage and only wants adventure... adventure that she thinks she may have found in the middle-aged author Henry Beyle, better known to his readers as Stendhal.

Review: It took me four show more nights of reading to get to page 118 of 268 (glacially slow for me) before I decided to give this book up. At almost the halfway point of a book, I feel like I should be interested in the characters, or the story, or something, but in the case of The Emperor's Body, I just couldn't find anything that made me want to pick it up again after I'd set it down. The characters were dull and none of them were particularly likeable, which made caring about their "love" "triangle" difficult, and while the expedition had the potential to be interesting, it was just getting started by the time I quit. There was also some stuff with a Stendhal being trailed by spies - I think? - but it wasn't explained very clearly and only barely affected the action of the story.

Wanting to be sure I wasn't missing anything brilliant, I skipped ahead and skimmed the last 35 pages or so. And it turns out: I wasn't. The characters and their relationships were just as dull, and had barely progressed in their relationships since the beginning of the story. Maybe I missed the best 100 pages of the book in the middle, there, but somehow I doubt it. The writing's not awful or anything; in fact there were some nicely phrased musings amidst the philosophical bits of the first half of the novel. It's just that I didn't care to wade through any more of a book I wasn't interested in to find them. 1.5 out of 5 stars. show less

Literary writing is an art, not a science, something that can be clearly gleaned from this novel, which reads like an exercise in the scientific approach to fiction writing. Even though the title of this book is The Emperor's Body by Peter Brooks, there is no reason why the retrieval of Napoleon's remains from the island of St. Helena is in any way important to the rest of the story, which is about a murky love triangle. It is not even explained with enough reasoning why the return of show more Napoleon's body to France is such a grand event. The author appears to make the classic mistake that unless you show a direct link between an event and a person, the reader isn't going to care about the wider implications of that event. For example the events in Russia during the time of War and Piece are directly and clearly linked to the main characters because it starts with those real people and it is about them, not the bigger historical impact, unlike The Emperor's Body where everyone and everything seems to be incidental to everything else. Likewise, it is very mysterious why one of the characters, the author Stendhal, was chosen to feature in this work. There are some historical links that might better explain the relationship between the old womanizing author of The Charterhouse of Parma a British government official on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic and a European socialite who can't make up her mind who she wants to marry. At is stands the book reads like a history textbook with many facts left out. For example if you did not know who the author Stendhal was you will miss a lot of the more subtle character developments. Similarly the story itself leaves out many explanations as to why these particular characters are or were so interesting and why their lives touch ours?

So what's happening? It appears that in our current cultural age we put a tremendous amount of value on scientific acumen. The more you know the more you can (fill in any kind of skill for 'can'). Many historical novels are now written by academics, which gives us a sense that the facts are reliable and well researched. Another good example is Roma by Steven Saylor. Although rich in historical detail with plenty of interesting events even, they do not however feel reliable in the way humans are presented.

Most writers with an academic or formal background tend to focus on plot and structure. Peter Brooks is no exception and this book, The Emperor's Body is a prime example of narrative structure gone out of control. We are immediately introduced to what appear to be multiple narrators, neither of which apparently know what they are doing and tell us as much. After these confusing first chapters the book continually switches perspective without many clues as to who we're now following and sometimes this switch in perspective occurs right in the middle of a chapter! Most of the time reading this book I spent trying to figure out who was doing what, why and when, quite remarkable for a novel with such a small amount of characters.

What probably bothers me most about this particular author is that with such a bad first literary attempt Peter Brooks appears to have already produced a book on writing called: Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Ironically the author fails miserably in creating an understandable plot, or any kind of guiding structure, with The Emperor's Body, a book that has so many imperceptible little twists and such grossly misused structure that one wishes he had read his own book on plot first. show less