The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun, by Paul West
reviewed by David W. Madden

Untitled document

Paul West. Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun. New Directions, 2002. 262 pp. $25.95.

Cheops is Paul West’s twenty-second novel, and as with W. B. Yeats before him, West’s muse gets younger and more vibrant with each new book. Once again West wanders into a corner of history, in this case ancient history, to imagine an unlikely meeting of titans who joust and inspire one another. The novel features multiple narrators, the most important of which are the Egyptian god Osiris, the pharaoh Cheops, and the Greek historian Herodotus. Cheops’s dream of astral travel is fulfilled when Osiris allows Herodotus to visit Egypt two thousand years before his birth and interview the pharaoh whom he disparaged in the tenth book of his history. This Herodotus is a sensationalist hack who somehow wins the pharaoh’s favor, and presiding over the verbal and intellectual competition is a god who reaches up into the twentieth century to bring the music of Frederick Delius to Cheops to soothe him on his passage into eternity. Since the early 1980s West has written one fascinating historical novel after another, but Cheops stands as perhaps his most audacious. The anachronisms that appear in early works here become a central motif as West suggests that all human events, wherever they occur in time, impinge upon one another and define what it means to be human. The Delius sections, a narrative within the narrative, are delightful, not only a paean to but an argument for the centrality of music in human experience as perhaps the most refined of the arts. West’s historical fictions remind one of Foucault’s phrase about “reverse discourse,” in this case a narrative that interrogates and problematizes other narratives. Herodotus’s Cheops becomes one version among many, but not one born of malice or ill will. Instead, West illustrates the often-overlooked notion that history is as much a narrative as fiction and often just as impressionistic and individual. Cheops is further evidence that West remains one of our most challenging and invigorating novelists.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun, by Paul West reviewed by David W. Madden Untitled document Paul West. Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun. New Directions, 2002. 262 pp. $25.95. Cheops is Paul West’s twenty-second novel, and as with W. B. Yeats before him, West’s muse gets younger and more vibrant with each new book. Once again West wanders into a corner of history, in this case ancient history, to imagine an unlikely meeting of titans who joust and inspire one another. The novel features multiple narrators, the most important of which are the Egyptian god Osiris, the pharaoh Cheops, and the Greek historian Herodotus. Cheops’s dream of astral travel is fulfilled when Osiris allows Herodotus to visit Egypt two thousand years before his birth and interview the pharaoh whom he disparaged in the tenth book of his history. This Herodotus is a sensationalist hack who somehow wins the pharaoh’s favor, and presiding over the verbal and intellectual competition is a god who reaches up into the twentieth century to bring the music of Frederick Delius to Cheops to soothe him on his passage into eternity. Since the early 1980s West has written one fascinating historical novel after another, but Cheops stands as perhaps his most audacious. The anachronisms that appear in early works here become a central motif as West suggests that all human events, wherever they occur in time, impinge upon one another and define what it means to be human. The Delius sections, a narrative within the narrative, are delightful, not only a paean to but an argument for the centrality of music in human experience as perhaps the most refined of the arts. West’s historical fictions remind one of Foucault’s phrase about “reverse discourse,” in this case a narrative that interrogates and problematizes other narratives. Herodotus’s Cheops becomes one version among many, but not one born of malice or ill will. Instead, West illustrates the often-overlooked notion that history is as much a narrative as fiction and often just as impressionistic and individual. Cheops is further evidence that West remains one of our most challenging and invigorating novelists.

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