Woman in Battle Dress

July 1, 2015
The final novel from Cuban writer Benitez-Rojo (1931-2005) is a grand historical work about the kind of woman history often ignores. As a medical student in 19th-century France, Henriette Faber disguised herself as a man. Eventually, she entered Napoleon's army as a surgeon. Though she aspired to saving lives, she eventually became a criminal, guilty of perjury, "sexual deviance" (according to the mores of the time, anyway), and plenty more, banned from all other Spanish territories. Benitez-Rojo embodies this woman, a spiritual sister of Defoe's Moll Flanders. What drove her from potential heroism into destitution? To answer this question, the novel moves from New York to Paris, from New Orleans to Cuba, spanning the globe and including situations of sweeping romance (this is the kind of story Ophuls or Visconti would've made a film of in the 1950s) but always remaining anchored to Henriette's thoughtful first-person narration-sometimes too thoughtful. The prose here is dense and purposefully old-fashioned; it's the kind of book where sentences begin, "It was said that...." This is a big novel and a slow-going one, measured in its pace even in its more emotional moments. For example, the first section follows Henriette's marriage to Robert-a relationship that the movie posters would describe as "tumultuous" even though the reader rarely senses Henriette or the author getting worked up; this book is often distant by design. Nevertheless, Benitez-Rojo has a knack for simile-a street "looks like a long black cat," and an unwanted visitor is "like a mortar shell"-and rarely has a historical person been so fully inhabited since Yourcenar told the story of Hadrian. Eventually, the novel morphs into metatext: "I believe that all writing has a utilitarian purpose," the narrator says, trying to write her story. And often, the matter of embodying another person's consciousness is useful enough. A sweeping, if flawed, historical novel.

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August 1, 2015
Henriette Faber's life seems tailor-made for fiction. A Swiss orphan who disguised herself as a man, studied medicine in Paris, and served as a surgeon in Napoleon's Grand Armee during France's invasion of Russia in 1812, she later worked as a doctor in Cuba, where her identity was discovered only after she married another woman. In his impressive, hugely enjoyable final novel, the late Benitez-Rojo revivifies this little-known figure and recognizes her as an early champion for gender equality. Presented mostly chronologically, Henriette's first-person account offers the complexity of an old-fashioned adventure narrative, packed with history and incident, yet is told with a candid, modern voice. Shaping her chronicle as she wishes, she stitches together numerous episodes, moving from her romance with a dashing Hussar to her picaresque journey with a traveling show, and spends significant time on Napoleon's military victories and disasters, including the horrific retreat from Moscow. Details from Caribbean history are interwoven throughout, and through Henriette's eyes, the author also addresses the economic factors that kept slavery alive in his native land.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)