Schiff acknowledges the dimensions of her problem: "[C]lassical authors were indifferent to statistics and occasionally even to logic; their accounts contradict one another and themselves. Appian is careless with details, Josephus is hopeless with chronology. Dio preferred rhetoric to exactitude." And then, of course, the victorious Romans wanted their say, their way, and so Cleopatra did not escape the embellishments of raw propaganda. Schiff enters this evidentiary minefield with honesty and pluck. She will remember which author had a problem with women, "who wrote with the zeal of a Roman convert, who meant to settle a score, please his emperor, perfect his hexameter." Lucan merits little of her attention; he was a sensationalist.
Schiff explains that, in writing this book, she has not "attempted to fill in the blanks." Mostly, she wishes "to restore context." This sounds reasonable and not over reaching. In fact, however, this book does far, far more and that is the problem. It is a biography that presses, on every page, to counter age-old character assassination with a vital new interpretation (one now shared by a number of modern historians). Schiff has set out to prove that, rather than being Plutarch’s "bold coquette," Cleopatra was a "remarkably capable queen, canny and opportunistic in the extreme, a strategist of the first rank." Surely, Schiff has filled in the blanks — and more. In many of her conclusions, she runs counter to the thinking of British historian Adrian Goldsworthy who, using many of the same sources in his recent Antony and Cleopatra (Yale University Press: 2010), rejects the assertion that Cleopatra was a successful international power broker.
What, then, are we to think about the delicious story that Schiff has given us? The writing is delightful; light and lively with compelling images. She describes Cleopatra’s Alexandria, for example as "a scholarly paradise with a quick business pulse and a languorous resort culture." And the context is often strong, instructive, and perhaps not for the faint of heart. Yes, Cleopatra murdered her siblings but Herod, we are to recall, murdered his children. This happened "by necessity in the best of families, Plutarch assures us, monarchy being ‘so utterly unsociable a thing.' "
In the end, we must ask ourselves if Schiff has successfully peeled away two millennia of myth and propaganda or, rather, given us a new myth, a Cleopatra who fits modern, Western feminist thinking. Read the book, perhaps alongside Goldsworthy’s, and decide for yourself.
Reviewed by Jill Norgren
And the Pursuit of Happiness (Amazon)
by Maira Kalman
Published by Penguin Press, ©2010; Harcover, 471 pp
Maira Kalman is, in too many ways to enumerate here, something of a reviewer’s nightmare. It’s much easier to launch into a descriptive commentary on a book of artwork, or a volume of history, or a biography, or a philosophical tome, all of which at least present a genre, a frame of reference, within which to comment on the author’s effectiveness. Kalman’s work, however, encompasses all of the foregoing and more. It is an explosion of such brilliance that one scarcely knows where to start.
Perhaps the only viable beginning is simply: "I loved it."
To call her work idiosyncratic isn’t nearly powerful enough to describe what she has produced. The book bears a distant relation to graphic novels, except that it isn’t a novel; it simply contains her drawings and paintings, some of which are directly related to the assorted subjects of the text, like the portrait of Benjamin Franklin in a piece on American inventors. Some, however, are just little byproducts of the author’s adventures, like a rendering of her hotel room in Washington when she goes to visit the Supreme Court. The easily-read text is hand-lettered throughout, and scattered across the page, fitted in and around the artwork.
The twelve chapters are labeled by the months of the year 2009, and they follow Kalman’s take on the events of her life during that time. Beginning with the inauguration of President Obama, she riffs on subjects and places as varied as:
Ft. Campbell and the Pentagon (her thoughts on war)
Abraham Lincoln ("I looked deep into his eyes and found that I was falling in love.")