2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By Niki Swanson
Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a very personal book, as it is about my many-greats-removed grandmother. My mother gave me a copy as a gift that she had found in a funky little second-hand store in a remote little town. I read it and loved it. Each of my daughters wanted a copy, so this purchase was for one of them. She read it and loved it. Even if it has no personal meaning to a reader, it is a very good book, an enjoyable read, and full of history and love(s).
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Amazon Verified Purchase
Firstly, the description was bang on. Given the age of the book, the condition was spectacular! I was so thrilled with it that when I gave it to my friend for her birthday, I told her she could re-gift it to me for mine! Having a dust jacket and in such good condition makes it perfect. That added picture of the author, now deceased, with her son, and a short description of her life was such a bonus.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Edward
Over the past couple of months I've been reading historical novels, and it was just by chance that I came across a 1953 edition of Annemarie Selinko's "Désirée" at a dollar book sale. I remembered that it had enjoyed a great popularity in the 1950s, being translated from the original German into several languages and staying on best-seller lists for weeks at a time. (This edition, across from the dedication page, says "Translated from the German" but on the same page the publishers "wish to acknowledge the special assistance of Joy Gary". Was Joy Gary the translator? It's not clear.) The novel, written in the style of a diary, follows the life of Désirée Clary from being a teenage citoyenne in 1794 Marseilles to being crowned Queen of Sweden and Norway in 1829. Dust jackets on early editions of the novel revealed a pert mam'selle with nose retroussé and neckline décolleté, giving the false impression that this is what is called a bodice-buster. Now, the novel is not Tolstoy by any stretch of the imagination but neither is it a Harlequin Romance. Carefully researched and written with panache, "Désirée" is a very good example of the historical novel in the "a certain Nelson, a certain Beethoven" style. (The idea of this being a woman's diary is a little hard to accept: the novel is 495 pages long; Désirée would have to be lugging around a journal the size of the Oxford English Dictionary in order to get all that text down in long hand.) Désirée Clary, as most readers seem to know, was a real person who was briefly engaged to Napoleon Bonaparte before he rejected her in favor of the politically-connected widow Josephine de Beauharnais. (Some nice historical irony: more than 20 years after Napoleon jilted Désirée for Josephine, Désirée's son Oscar I married Josephine's grand-daughter.) This journalist is not suppose to be extremely sophisticated, so that political and military situations have to be explained to her (and thereby, of course, to the reader). On the other hand, Désirée is quick enough to notice that Napoleon's emblematic bee is an inverted fleur-de-lys. The real Désirée is just a footnote in history; but this novel, for dramatic purposes, makes her influence much more important than it really was. (Or, as Annemarie Selinko writes in an afterward: "This book ... has its own reality.") For instance, it is highly unlikely that Désirée was present at Napoleon's second abdication, much less that he relinquished his sword to her -- in a rose garden, yet. But the novel is filled with enough colorful descriptions -- Napoleon's intimate teas and lavish receptions (where one meets the likes of Talleyrand), Désirée's visit to a Paris hospital after the Russian débâcle -- that make the exaggerations acceptable. If the sentimentality gets a little thick at times, "Désirée" is still an imaginative depiction of an momentous era.
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