If I were to recommend only one novel about the Amarna Period to anyone, it would be this slender novel by Naguib Mahfouz. This is not because I enjoyed it the most, or because it was the most exciting. It is because it is by a Nobel Prize winner and, more importantly, an actual Egyptian.
The novel is written in a Rashomon style, with the literary care that most ancient Egyptian historical novels lack. There is no dwelling on splendid palace grounds, lush ancient nights or grand monuments; Mahfouz felt no need for this. The evanescence and delicacy of his straightforward prose is enough. Salacious details and invented love triangles are beneath him. He worked with the archaeological evidence known best to him at the time.
However, like archaeological evidence, the novel itself leaves one strangely unsatisfied, and wishing that there had been more.
The Amarna Period: Akhnaton, King of Egypt, by Dmitri Merezhkovsky, trans. Natalie Duddington (1927)
Thanks to this list, I was able to find some more fiction for this project of mine. Merezhkovsky’s novel is one of the earliest listed that is available to me in English. Nonetheless, it is Russian through and through.
Historical accuracy is beside the point in this work. Tutankhamon-Tutankhaton is not depicted as a little boy or teenager, but as an officious ambassador of Egypt under Akhnaton. In a previous book, not available to me, he had gone to Crete and rescued a Cretan dancer named Dio from her execution. Why he did so is not made clear; he doesn’t have much interest in her, and his personality switches from generous to self-interested to murderous at the touch of narrative need. The characters wander in and out, ebb and flow from decent to wicked.
This is, however, beside the point. Unlike most other authors of novels on the subject, Merezhkovsky does not write this book to tell us What Really Happened. It is a mystical work, jumbling characters and religions from the ancient Near East to ramble towards its thesis – Akhnaton was a pre-incarnation of Christ. I do not suggest that Merezhkovsky believed this literally, in the way that Ahmed Osman believes that Moses and Akhnaton were the same person, but I also doubt that Merezhkovsky would put so much importance in the question of what he literally believed.
I am not terribly familiar with Russian literature, but this is unmistakably a book written by someone in exile from the Soviet regime, as Merezhkovsky was. In no other book have I read about a quarrel with a minor bureaucrat to secure a pass to visit the palace. One lost and despairing character soliloquizes to the dead king: “This is what I am driven to in my dreariness! It is dreary, Enra, very dreary. Can it be as bad in your world? Always the same thing – rotten fish in eternity . . . Or is it rather different with you? Is it worse or better? You are silent?” Two pages of this. It’s like an ancient Near Eastern Tolstoy novel, and about as easy to love.
You’re unlikely to run across a copy of this, except perhaps in a good used bookstore. But if you do, and you pick it up, it shouldn’t be for the experience of typical ancient Egyptian historical fiction. Merezhkovsky wrote from a time and a perspective that we do not now have, and yet we are no farther or closer to the real people of the Amarna Period than he was. The book is valuable in itself for other reasons, and those are perhaps best appreciated by a reader of Russian, not myself.
My review for KBR of Mardi Gras Two-Step by Barry M. Vass
NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.
This dark 1970s police procedural gives way to an otherworldly horror. I found it a fast, gripping read, well painted in broad strokes and decently characterized. The madness of Mardi Gras is so well evoked that it becomes unclear whether the town is in turmoil because of the constant unsolved murders of young women or simply because it is Mardi Gras.
Female characters don’t come off well in this novel, although it is most likely because cops in the ’70s tended not to get on well with them. The ending was a slight disappointment, leaving loose ends untied, but nonetheless as full of dark, weird action as the rest of the book. I was left wanting more of this book, perhaps even a sequel.
The Amarna Period: Why the hiatus?
I ran out of books and works that seemed, for lack of a better word, fair to criticize. There is no shortage of Amarna Period novels published on Amazon and/or Smashwords. There is also a good deal of . . . well, of this kind of a thing. But there is so little that is critically valuable to say about such things. The word “sucks” is not, I am afraid, critically valuable in all matters. People love a good hatchet-job, of course, but hatchet-jobs are only required when there is some kind of need to punch upward — to debunk nonsense before it gets very far.
I am looking for more books and works to review as part of the fictional historiography of the Amarna Period. I am particularly interested in the Broadway musical Nefertiti, which died quickly and was briefly resurrected about ten years ago, but I can’t get ahold of a good cast recording. But until I find something worth mentioning, I must keep my lips closed.
Yes, I disappeared again
More to follow in the next few days.
My review for KBR of Earthquakes (a prequel to Resurrecting Arcadia) by Melissa Miles McCarter
NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.
This brief, warm novella introduces the reader to the world of Arcadia, Missouri, a struggling and struggled-over Ozark town. Three women separate in time, from the 1840s through the present day, will find their lives intertwined and affected in the coming novel, Resurrecting Arcadia.
The characters are a little flat as yet, and the exposition about Arcadia itself might have been better saved for the novel following. But the novel has ample chance to remedy this. Although I have not yet had a chance to read Resurrecting Arcadia, I would certainly want to begin with this novella.
Information imparted to me by a young woman on a train to Providence in 2006, and written down as fast as it came
I just was visiting my man. I have an eight-month-old daughter at home. I have four kids. I’m 21.
My six-year-old is a model. She’s a pageant winner. She’s out in Texas with her grandmother at a model competition. She won all the ones in her age group already. I’m worried about her out there, where that JonBenet Ramsey case was. All those JonBenets.
My sister paid three hundred dollars for this purse.
I weigh 153. It’s all muscle!
Yeah. My man treats me right. He bought my six-year-old diamond earrings for her pageant. He said to her, don’t wear those anywhere else. He must have spent two hundred thousand dollars on just those earrings for her. I’m wearing seven or eight thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry right now. My man has him a eighteen-thousand-dollar necklace with a big Jesus hanging right here, and it’s all diamonds because it’s Jesus, and the Jesus cost ten thousand dollars and the chain cost eight thousand dollars.
Yeah, you see this scar? That’s from a broken bottle. My mom hit me with a broken bottle. I had a tough childhood. I was raped, beaten, molested — even my mother molested me.
Cosmos 2014: Sisters of the Sun
This episode left me with one important question: why did Tyson choose a red? If you are going to sit in the sun on a fine pale-green day in Italy, toasting the evanescence of glory and of starlight itself, why would you choose a red wine? It’s too heavy and sedate, plus you’ll have a headache. Better to choose a crisp Pinot Grigio, or a bright prosecco, something that will let the sunlight through before you transform it into acoustic energy to speak of the stars.
Once again the influence of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything is apparent in this new series, and I for one have no complaint. The undertold stories of Annie Jump Cannon – how can the bearer of such a name not be fantastic – and of Henrietta Swan Leavitt will never appear again in so dramatic a fashion.
I have said before that this new series is not for the likes of me, the oldening person who liked the quiet pace of the first series just fine. But the reference to “the backbone of night,” one of the original series episode names, and the direct quoting of Sagan was clearly intended for those of us that remember. It seems that every time I sit down and turn the lights out for this show, I am moved more than I expect to be.
State of the blog
You must have noticed that it’s pretty precarious. I can only manage to whomp out my weekly reviews of Cosmos and an occasional cryptic opinion. I am sorry for this. My health issues are steadily improving, but I’m working on some private losses right now, and I prefer to be alone with them for now.
Cosmos 2014: The Clean Room
Mid-century Cosmos Noir is not what I was expecting. When I realized, from the opening animation, that this episode would tell the story of Clair Patterson, I felt a rush. This man was an unsung lifesaver of the twentieth century, the Norman Borlaug of environmentalism. This is the kind of story that belongs on Cosmos – the world of the infinitely small as inextricably meshed with our day-to-day lives.
My only complaint is that Thomas Midgley, Jr., the inventor of tetraethyl lead, was not cast as an animated villain. This man was almost hilariously nefarious. According to Wikipedia:
On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. . . Midgley sought treatment for lead poisoning in Europe a few months after his demonstration at the press conference.
L.T. Patridge 