European Peoples & Cultures - Fiction & Literature, Character Types - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Hermes in Paris

Name: Hermes in Paris
Author: Peter Vansittart
ISBN: 9780720611069

by Peter Vansittart

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Overview

Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, likes to return to Earth now and again. He chooses to do so in Paris at the time of Napoleon III, a time of great frivolity and instability. Here he decides to play the most explosive practical joke in the world's history.

Hermes—God, trickster and mischief-maker—is also the protector of shepherds, travelers' guide, conductor of souls to the underworld, messenger of Zeus, bringer of good luck, and patron of orators, writers, athletes, merchants, and thieves. To indulge his curiosity he visits Earth from time to time looking for opportunities to play practical jokes and stir up the population. He chooses to holiday in Paris at the time of the brilliant but unstable court of Napoleon III—another opportunist, conspiratorial and outwardly amiable—and the beautiful, nervy Empress Eugenie. Hermes finds much to provoke his laughter—and such laughter is dangerous. Under his influence France enjoys a succession of illusions involving the highest in the land, the comfortable middle classes, and the journalists, poets, and intellectuals of Left Bank cafes, and everything flows inexorably towards the most explosive joke that Hermes can devise.

About the Author, Peter Vansittart

Peter Vansittart was the author of 29 books including his autobiographical work, Paths from a White Horse. In 1969 he won the Society of Authors Traveling Scholarship, and in 1981 he was one of six recipients of the first Writers' Bursaries awarded by the Arts Council. He was also a recipient of an O.B.E. for services to literature and his mastery of historical fiction.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Sweeping, elegant and majestically cool, Hermes in Paris paints a glittering picture of Second Empire Paris under Napoleon III. Told from the perspective of Hermes, the Greek trickster-god here appearing as a dapper, detached gentleman in a crimson satin cravat, the tale skims almost plotless over the teeming, glamorous city. History is the true protagonist of British writer Peter Vansittart's jewel of a novel, and his sophisticated revisionist take on the era is intriguing. ( Apr. 12) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A delectable work of lyric fiction offers an aural snapshot of Paris in the time of Napoleon III, glimpsed through the eternally wandering eyes of mythic trickster Hermes. While giving short shrift to proper plot, Vansittart (A Safe Conduct, 1996, etc.) inscribes language on these pages with the lush attentiveness of an adoring craftsman. Hermes is a night creature, "favouring darkened pavements, thieves' kitchens, backwater taverns at crossroads or in the remains of woodlands"; with amused detachment, he watches "the constant procession, cheerful, purposeless, stung into fresh being by the New Year promise." Properly, Hermes in Paris is a historical, its story strung through the unstable, socially and culturally tumultuous mid-ninth century. Yet the period is less a backdrop to the action than a player in the lives of Vansittart's characters, though they believe themselves both exempt from, and superior to, their time. The young journalist Charles-Luc de Massonier, pen name "Tacitus," finds the mediocrity of his cultural hour offensive to his own clear genius; he fusses and fulminates and is ultimately brought low in a duel by powers much greater than his own. Hermes accompanies Etienne and his ten-year-old son, Emile, as they wander through their jobs, amusements, and afternoon fields of grass. As is usual with atmospheric language, the prose here is highly impressionistic, and Hermes' voice caresses details as if seizing upon any permanency he can find: wine glasses, dinnerware, butler's vests, and soldier's breastplates exist as the vivid auras within which these deluded, vague, but touching human souls thrive. The substantial introduction strives but fails to locate the novelinany meaningful historical context. Vansittart's alluring gem is an exhilaration, a sigh, a prose poem that resembles a standard novel only in length. Lacking the poised densities of plot and character to ground it, it's caviar for the happy few.