Hermes in Paris

Rating:
Summary: Not a Page-Turning Historical Novel
Review: Reading _Hermes in Paris_ is like looking at the stars through a telescope. They glitter, but are distant and ultimately, cold.

Set just before and during the beginning of the collapse of Napoleon III's empire, this book has tremendous potential for plot action. Which is unfulfilled, apparently as a conscious literary conceit. The author doesn't even tell readers what happened to the major characters, either the famous ones whose fate is recorded in history or others who are probably fictional. Well, he does give some (welcome) hints in the Afterword, but this is not the same as incorporating a real ending into the book. The characters fail to come to life or engage the reader's concern. The book's conceit is that the political collapse was engineered by Hermes, the trickster god, for no reason except amusement. Hermes truly does not care what happens to the human beings he manipulates. While this is probably meant as a comment on the randomness and unfairness of history, the viewpoint of an indifferent god too closely resembles the viewpoint of an indifferent author.

The prose does, as I said, glitter. So if you are willing to read a book mostly for the language, you might like _Hermes in Paris_.