Fiction by Robert Allen
Napoleon’s Retreat
Napoleon’s Retreat
A deep and serious look at the interlocked lives of a dozen characters, chiefly that of Robert Weary, a man born to wealth and power who nonetheless takes part in a hapless attempt on the life of American ex-president Richard Nixon, fatally deflecting his own life and that of his friends and family. Napoleon’s Retreat is not just the stories of these people and their times, however. It is a collage of narratives, combining in the end to show that our knowing of a thing cannot come without being bent out of all recognition by the act of knowing — and perhaps more importantly by the mythopoeic power of language itself.
Robert Weary narrates all the tales that make up Napoleon’s Retreat
and is the Napoleon of the title, styling himself Robert Napoleon Weary,
and sometimes Robert Napoleon Lajoie, a minor league baseball player of
the fifties. Others have their stories. Albert Hess, ex-mercenary soldier,
who dies in a Colorado creek during the assassination attempt, and whose
head, still talking, continues to spin tales of the past while the cold
water flows over him like time itself. There is Monica, sax-player in
a band called Vern & the Minnows, who has become the object of Weary’s
obsessive desire. A shadowy figure known as The Peacock Angel watches
from behind a mirror, and the doomed Ellis Rancourt trails through the
narrative with the demons nipping at his heels. A monster names Wittgenstein
falls in love with Robert Weary, even though her creator, Etienne Bliss,
had thought the default gender was male....
Critical Comment
“More a charge than a retreat...lively and unquestionably gifted prose. ”
— The Globe and Mail
“...a work of sustained, unrelenting, unmercifully protracted brilliance.”
— The Montreal Gazette
“...the story of the ultimate failure of artfulness ... before the bittersweet finitude of our merely human nature....”
— Prairie Fire
Author Robert Allen
Author Biography
British born and raised in England, Canada, and the United States, Robert Allen is the author of a number of books of poetry and fiction, including Magellan's Clouds, The Indigo Hotel, Wintergarden, The Hawryliw Process, Blues & Ballads, A June Night in the Late Cenozoic, and Ricky Ricardo Suites.
Robert Allen is the editor of Matrix and for many years served
as the director of the Concordia creative writing program.
Also by the Author
The Moosehead Anthology VI, ed. R.E.N. Allen & Grant Loewen, 74 pp., 6 x 9, January 1997, Fiction — ISBN: 0-919688-37-3 (paper) ... $13.95
The Moosehead Anthology VIII: The Matrix Interviews, ed. R.E.N. Allen & Angela Carr, 186 pp., 6 x 9, July 2001, Anthology — ISBN: 0-919688-86-1 (paper) ... $14.95
Ricky Ricardo Suites, Robert Allen, 85 pp., 6 x 8 1/2, November 2000, Poetry — ISBN: 0-919688-74-8 (paper) ... $13.95 — ISBN: 0-919688-76-4 (Bound) ... $25.95
To order click on title or logo below...
Napoleon’s Retreat, Robert Allen , 312 pp., 5 3/8 x 8, Novel, December, 1997
ISBN: 0-919688-35-7 (paper) . . . $19.95