"Culture is not just something that goes around the world but also goes backward and forward in time," editor Cheryl Klein said. As someone who has edited a number of award-winning translated works, she should know. "A lot of the ideas we discuss now have been wrestled with throughout the ages, like the nature of free will or a ruler's approach." She noted that fiction allows you to see those dramas playing out as they were lived, not just through the history books.
One of the things that attracted Klein to Cleopatra's Moon was that she'd never known Cleopatra had a daughter. "We think of her as queen and sex symbol, and we don't think of her as a mother. They seem like mutually exclusive roles, but of course they're not," Klein explained. Another was that the book "takes us beyond most historical fiction--which might tell a great story of a specific time or place, but then leave it at that. This story used its historical framework to explore larger ideas, like free will," she said. "It's a story of loss. Her family, her country--these things are being stripped away from Cleopatra Selene one by one. Vicky uses those historical facts to explore free will versus fate."
Both author and editor agreed that much of Klein's role was to keep "an eye on the narrative line," as Klein put it. From a multitude of engrossing facts, they had to choose the ones that were the most emotionally compelling. "What is advancing Cleopatra Selene's story as well as helping us understand the culture she came from, and what would be exciting to readers?" became the guiding principle. Shecter originally had wanted to use as the heroine's opening flashback an event that occurred when Cleopatra Selene was four years old--the first time she met her father, Marcus Antonius.
In that scene, she overhears a discussion that Roman fathers can have ultimate say about the life or death of their children. If the father wants to keep the child, he picks it up and claims it. If he doesn't want to claim the child, he'd step over the child, and it would be put to death. However, Klein preferred the scene they chose--a grand pageant in which Marcus Antonius makes his "Dispositions of War," granting each of the children a whole country, before the entire Egyptian public--because it showed how much was at stake, and these historical figures' larger-than-life personalities. "It's not just whether my father is going to acknowledge me, but will he give me a kingdom?" Klein said with a laugh, adding, "It also sets up the conflict [with Octavianus in Rome] very neatly, too."
Photo: Cal Werry