The Death of Napoleon [Paperback]

As he bore a vague resemblance to the Emperor, the  sailors on board theHermann-Augustus Stoefferhad nicknamed him Napoleon. And so, for convenience, that is what we shall call him.
     Besides, hewasNapoleon. . . .

Napoleon has escaped from St. Helena, leaving a double behind him. Now disguised as the cabin hand Eugène Lenormand and enduring the mockery of the crew (Na­po­leon, they laughingly nickname the pudgy, hopelessly clumsy little man), he is on his way back to Europe, ready to make contact with the huge secret organization that will return him to power. But then the ship on which he sails is rerouted from Bordeaux to Antwerp. When Napoleon disembarks, he is on his own.

He revisits the battlefield of Waterloo, now a tourist destination. He makes his way to Paris. Mistakes, misunderstandings, and mishaps conduct our puzzled hero deeper and deeper into the mystery of Napoleon.

“What a pleasure to read a real writer...The Death of Napoleon is utterly satisfying sentence by sentence and scene by scene, but it is also compulsively readable...By giving us a Napoleon who cannot find how to retrieve [his public] face, Simon Leys throws light on our universal need to bring inner and outer reality together, to understand who we really are. —Gabriel Josipovici, The Times Literary Supplement

“I am glad to report that Simon Leys’sThe Death of Napoleonhas one hell of an idea—the absurdity of trying to retrieve time or glory—and is written with the grace of a poem.” —Edna O’Brien,The Sunday Times

“Alternative history...is enjoyable and at the same time, like all daydreaming, brings a sensation of guilt. But The Death of Napoleon is also a fable, and Simon Leys is an expert fabulist.” —Penelope Fitzgerald, The New York Times Book Review