The Emperor of San Francisco and the Territory Beyond (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

Although the novel is loosely based on a true, mythic San Francisco figure, this Emperor has not existed before. The novel is an American story of invention and reinvention of the self. The young Joshua Abraham Norton sails from South Africa to San Francisco during the Gold Rush of 1849. The novel briefly sketches his rise to eminence as a successful merchant. On the verge of a great future, he is about to propose marriage to Coraline Cole at a Christmas Masquerade Ball. At the Ball, however, he discovers the news of his ruin. He flees the Ball and his beloved Coraline. He is now bankrupt. He has seen the elephant. Love lost and love to be recovered and the price to be paid for that recovery becomes a sustaining thematic element of the plot. He disappears from public view and for several years becomes a wandering solitary in the territory beyond San Francisco, a life among barren dunes and wave-lapped shores. He is living more and more in a world without substance, a world of dreams, forms, apparitions and memory. He knows there lies madness. The novel traces the how, the why, the form of emergence from this state to reappear again in the streets of San Francisco as the self-proclaimed Crown Prince to the throne of Bourbon and Emperor of the United States. Has he finally gone mad? What is happening? San Francisco affectionately and warmly embraces him. The newspapers publish his proclamations, shops carry his imprimatur, he dines at restaurants and bars free of charge, audiences in the theaters rise when he enters. There are Emperor Norton figurines, Emperor Norton cigars, Emperor Norton post cards, Emperor Norton Three Star Brandy. He is a tourist attraction. He is money to be made. He has become in effect a great actor, a picaresque figure, whose stage is as large as San Francisco. He gathers about him in his Privy Council some of the eccentrics of San Francisco, George Washington II, the Great Unknown, the Guttersnipe, the Money King, The King of Pain. He has an affair with the Duchess of Landsfield, Lola Montez. He has the affection and friendship of Mark Twain. He issues his own currency, levies taxes. He is concerned with affairs of state. He reviews the troops at Berkeley, meets the Emperor of Brazil, conducts a wide correspondence with heads of state. As he moves through his adventures, comic and sorrowful, the Emperor breathed life and the mask, the disguise, the persona of the Emperor is and becomes perhaps an artifice which he seized upon to create with the cunning of an artist a life that has become our myth, our legend, and so our ever-recurring present.