NEW ANATOMIES and A DAY OF FEVER
Eberhardt actively pursued a life of poverty, vagrancy, and debauchery in the North African desert and ended up suffering from one or more of that region’s many diseases. In the opening scene the sick woman annoys the journalist attempting to interview her, but the journalist perseveres, sensing that the end is near for this extraordinary woman. During Eberhardt’s fever-fueled delirium, we learn her incredible story. She’s the illegitimate child of a flighty Swiss mother who eloped with her children’s tutor in 1877; her eccentric Russian father gave his child a classical education, teaching her several languages, but dressed her as a boy throughout her childhood and encouraged her to isolate herself from her society. On a visit to Algeria with her mother, Eberhardt fell in love with the place, so unlike stuffy Europe. A year later, in 1897, to the horror of her family she returned to that politically volatile region dressed as a young man, Si Mahmoud, to roam with the nomadic tribes, study in Sufi monasteries, and devote her nights to drinking, sodomy, and kif smoking. Over the next seven years she faithfully chronicled her extensive travels, her secret missions for the French government, and her adulation by the salon society of fin de siecle Paris, until she died in a flash flood (the irony of drowning in a desert is noted by one of the characters in New Anatomies) at the age of 28.
