This is an attractive little hardback that I picked up at the bowls club for the princely sum of twenty five pence. The club has a book corner where everything is sold for that same price but, even so, much of the stock has celebrated several anniversaries sitting unloved and gathering dust on the shelves. Apparently there is not much of a market for dog-eared cookery books or old copies of Readers Digest, but every now and then an unwanted gift is dumped on the top, and I suspect that is how this one came to be there.
Published in 2016, this is the story of Mata Hari, the exotic dancer and courtesan who achieved great fame in the early part of the twentieth century but was executed as a spy in 1917. She billed herself as a Hindi artist, although she was actually Margaretha Zelle who was born in the Netherlands and had married an officer in the Dutch colonialist army. The marriage was not a success, and her husband refused to let her have custody of their daughter, so Margaretha Zelle became Mata Hari and took to the stage in an effort to raise funds to help her get her daughter back. During her marriage they had been stationed in Indonesia and so she drew on her superficial knowledge of Eastern culture to create her dances. She became an instant success in Paris and other major cities, although I suspect that may have had a lot to do with her willingness to appear virtually naked on stage.
Paulo Coelho writes the book as Mata Hari's final letter that she wanted to be passed on to her daughter. The writing style feels as though it has lost something in the translation from Portuguese, as it comes across as quite bland in places, but I did learn a lot about Mata Hari whose name is still used as a generic term for a femme fatal to this day.
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