Antonio Benitez-Rojo

Woman in Battle Dress by Cuban author Antonio Benitez Rojo is based on the true story of Henriette Faber. Henriette was born in Switzerland in 1791. In 1809, at the age of 18 and at a time when women were prohibited from studying medicine, she enrolled in medical school disguised as a man. She was drafted into the Napoleonic army and took part in the 1812 retreat in Russia. She eventually emigrated to Cuba where she continued to practice medicine. She eventually married a woman. Three years later, the woman turned her into the authorities and she became the subject of one of Cuba’s most sensational trials.

Henriette was a woman who refused to accept the limitations of her time and was willing to suffer the same hardships that would have been considered heroic in a man. Instead, she was humiliated, stripped of her license, imprisoned, forced to dress in women’s clothes, and eventually exiled. Yet little has ever been heard of her outside of Cuba. In Woman in Battle Dress, Rojo has taken the bare outlines of her life and written a truly sweeping and engrossing historical novel.

The story is admittedly slow but slow doesn’t always mean bad or boring and certainly not in this case. I found myself rereading passages and pages not because I missed something but because I wanted to experience it again. Rojo does an impeccable job of recreating not only Henriette’s life but her voice. This was especially true when writing about her experience as she takes part in the army’s retreat in the dead of a cold Russian winter – Henriette speaks with the clarity and objectivity of a scientist but despite or perhaps because of this, this section of the novel is truly as chilling as the landscape and experiences she is describing.

Woman in Battle Dress is written in the style of a memoir supposedly as she is on her way to exile in Louisiana and in the dense prose of the era, a style that may be off-putting to some readers. However, for any who are fans of historical novels or the classics, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

4.5… (mais)