Hottentot Venus.

Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud Doubleday, November 2003 $24.00, ISBN 0-385-50856-5

These are the facts as we know them: In 1810, a woman from Southern African's Khoisan tribe was brought to England by two white men and put on display in a freak show at 225 Piccadilly, London. Named by her keepers the "Hottentol Venus," thousands came to view her protruding buttocks and elongated labia--artificially enhanced by her tribe as symbols of beauty--as if she were not human.

Scientists of the day called her the "missing link" between ape and man. Gawked at, taunted, and abused by hundreds of thousands of "civilized" Englishmen and women, in 1814 she was taken to France for further exhibition. Saartjie Baartman died in 1816 from pleurisy, tuberculosis and alcoholism. She was 27 years old.

Her body was dissected, and her brain and the "Hottentot apron" that resulted from the stretching of her labia, placed in jars. Her skeleton was stripped of flesh, reassembled and exhibited in French museums until 1974. It was not until 2002 that the pieces of Baaartman were collected and returned to South Africa for burial.

In Hottentot Venus, Barbara Chase-Riboud has done for Saartjie Baartman what she earlier Sally Hemings: taken a black woman who survives largely in mystery, myth and rumor, and through research and a compelling narrative brought her to life. Chase-Riboud's talent is the ability to write historical fiction that is meticulously detailed, descriptive and imagines the internal geography of those she writes about.

Hottentot Venus includes familiar people and events: Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles Darwin, the the French Revolution and American Civil War. Still, the most persuasive, heartbreaking, true voice is that of Baartman, a voice that springs wholly from Chase-Riboud's imagination, empathy, and writer's voice.

She deftly brings to life a woman who saw both parents and a husband murdered, lost an infant son, and drowned herself in unrequited love born of need and abandonment, first for an elderly missionary and later one of the men who lured her to England with promises of great riches and marriage. He then proceeded to make a great deal of money displaying her as a prehistoric rung on the evolutionary ladder, before losing her to a Frenchman in a card game.

Chase-Riboud skillfully illuminates the external and internal contradictions inherent in Baartman's simultaneous invisibility as a member of the human family and her hypervisibility as an objectified, sexualized object of disdain and desire. There are a few slow passages when Chase-Riboud speaks in the voices of predictable white men, but the voices of Baartman and other women are always compelling. In the end, this book gets under your skin in a way one imagines that those who exploited and examined the Hottentot Venus did hers.

Jill Nelson, the author of Sexual Healing, is writing a book about Martha's Vineyard.