Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Book Review: Nefertiti

Nefertiti hasn’t walked this earth for nearly 3500 years, but she is still remembered as a great beauty as evidenced by her bust which can be seen at the Neues Museum’s Egyptian Collection in Berlin, Germany. Besides, the image of her beauty what do we alive today know of her? Michelle Moran’sNefertiti’ attempts to fill in the blanks between how Nefertiti became the chief wife ofAkhenaten(who may or may not have suffered from Marfan’s Syndromebased on artistic interpretations of him on walls and statues) to being co-pharaoh with her husband. I should inject here that there is another book called ‘Nefertiti: Book of the Dead’ by Nick Drake that I read and reviewed back in 2009, which could be confused with Moran’s novel.
The story is narrated by Mutnodjmet who is Nefertiti’s younger sister as believed by the historical record. In the story they share the same father (Visor Ay who in later years became a pharaoh in his own right) but Nefertiti’s mother (whom Moran’s identifies as a Mitanni princessalthough there is speculation that Nefertiti herself was a Mitanni princess) died during Nefertiti’s birth so the sisters have different mothers. Did you get all that? Good, because to top everything else off in the book, Akhenaten’s mother is Ay’s sister so in the end it was a first cousin marriage – let’s give a shout out to recessive traits!
Although the world remembers Nefertiti as a powerful beautiful woman, Moran through the eyes of Mutnodjmet, sees her as demanding and manipulative. In fact, I found that a large amount of this novel was dedicated to making Nefertiti unlikeable. The only one who gets worse treatment in ‘Nefertiti’ is her husband. According to the historical record, upon achieving the throne Akhenaten turned away from Egypt’s multiple gods and devoted his reign to one God called Aten who was a sun deity. To praise Aten, especially because of the great social upheaval that his worship caused (polytheism to monotheism in a few short years for arguable the most powerful nation of the world at that time) Akhenaten decided to build his own city, and new Egyptian capital, near the Nile but off the beaten path. Amarna, which is just one of its few given names, lasted for about a generation before the sand reclaimed it.
In the novel Akhenaten orders his army to build the city as Egypt loses territories to neighboring nations (particularly the Hittites) which never puts a pharaoh in the good graces of his people. He makes his chief wife, Nefertiti, his co-ruler and gives her the title of pharaoh, which is a title much more powerful than being a mere queen. Of course throughout the novel there is a rivalry between Nefertiti and his first wife Kira, along with other political intrigues. All the while Mutnodjmet watches from the sidelines often wondering at the age of sixteen or so if she is ever going to be able to get married and have children… one of the things you have to get used to in historical novels, especially those dealing with events before the birth of Christ, is that people tended to live shorter lives so they got to being wives and mothers, not necessary husbands and fathers, very early in life because their biological clocks were really ticking at a different beat. Nefertiti married Akhenaten when she was fifteen (if I remember correctly in the novel).
I enjoyed ‘Nefertiti’ more for the history lesson than for the prose. I have just finished Moran’s ‘The Heretic Queen’ which I thought was a better read than this one. Although most of the plot is fiction, Moran does give her readers a historical overview along with other facts that make this book interesting. I think some of my disappointment with ‘Nefertiti’ is because Moran starts the ‘The Heretic Queen’ which is about Nefertiti’s niece, Nefertari, with a story about how Mutnodjmet’s husband, her son, her father (who was pharaoh by this time) her mother and even her nieces (Nefertiti’s children) all perish in a fire in the royal palace. The only survivor is Mutnodjmet who is then forced to marry the new pharaoh while still pregnant by her first husband. As a reader, I was like WOW and caught my breath before askingif I missed something at the end of ‘Nefertiti’. No, I didn’t, Moran just leaves this juicy part out. She ends ‘Nefertiti’ with a murder, but hope in the future that Tutankhamun (“Now, when I die don’t think I’m a nut, don’t want no fancy funeral just one like old King Tut” as sung by Steve Martin) will be a good pharaoh. There is much more to the story so I didn’t reveal that much –yet, there obviously is so much more that I felt cheated as if Moran had written four hundred and some pages and decided to end her story in the middle.
I don’t think Moran is going to be giving Philippa Gregory any sleepless nights when it comes to writing historical fiction, but I do appreciate that she has opened a new subgenre with ancientEgyptian history from a woman’s perspective. If you are interested in this time period than this book is a must read, if you aren’t than I don’t think you should bother.
BTW, I would highly recommend Moran’s History Buff website. I find it delightful.

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