Fortune
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
An audacious, entertaining historical epic spanning continents and centuries, for readers of David Mitchell, Colum McCann, Kate Atkinson, and Eleanor Catton.
Fortune is a dazzling, endlessly surprising historical novel that opens the day Napoleon leads his victorious Grande Armée into Berlin after having conquered Prussia in battle. As crowds throng the streets to witness the emperor in his glory, a handful of lives that briefly touch are sprung from their orbits and set on courses that will take them across Europe and around the world—their fates and desires sometimes intersecting—to strange lands in the Caribbean and South America, the Australian continent and Van Diemen's Land, and back to a Europe now transformed.
A frustrated general in Napoleon's army, billeted with one of Berlin's finest families. Elisabeth, a passionate young woman living in that house. The young man with whom she locks eyes through a window as he's engaged in a sexual encounter at the moment Napoleon makes his grand entrance. An entrepreneur in New World exotica, whose house is the setting for the tryst. A slave from Suriname, Mr. Hendrik, with his resentful white American companion, who have traveled to Berlin to sell a barrel of electric eels for their master. And a lost soul enamored of philosophy in the coffeehouses where students gather, who decides to join Mr. Hendrik and the American on their return voyage.
Through their stories amid war, cataclysm, colliding cultures, and misadventure, Lenny Bartulin imagines the ways that chance and the grand events of history shape the course of ordinary lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian writer Bartulin channels Henry Fielding in this spirited account of a handful of strangers who cross paths across decades and the planet. During Napoleon's triumphant Oct. 27, 1806, appearance in Berlin, the reader meets Johannes Meyer, an 18-year-old dreamer who cares little for his future; Elisabeth von Hoffman, 17, whose wanderlust is quashed by her guardian aunt; Claus von Rolt, a Prussian obsessed with collecting exotic beetles and other objects; American entrepreneur Wesley Lewis Jr.; and enslaved Surinamese man Mr. Hendrick, who is forced to accompany Lewis on a mission to deliver a barrel of electric eels to von Rolt. Johannes and Elisabeth, who glimpse each other for a moment in a crowd, are at the center of the narrative, set primarily against Napoleon's military campaigns. With consummate skill, Bartulin weaves the trajectory of Johannes's conscriptions in the French and British military (and subsequent imprisonments and escapes) with Elisabeth's parallel courtships by multiple suitors, leading toward a second run-in between the two in 1834 Chile, as Lewis and Hendrick head back to Suriname for more adventures. While the ending is a bit underwhelming, more satisfying is what lies in store for some of the other characters, such as the ironic outcome of Claus's preoccupation with shrunken heads. Bartulin's intricate canvas handily captures the vagaries of human life.
