Author: Per Olov Enquist
Translator: Jeong-hee Im
Publisher: Novel Mine
310 pages | 223*152mm
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean only. |
About This Book
From Publishers Weekly
Swedish novelist Enquist (The Royal Physician's Visit) finds various
riveting facets in the working friendship between Marie Curie and her lab
assistant, Blanche Wittman. Fixating on "the utterly perfect bodies of these two
women," Enquist zeroes in on what befell Blanche's, and on what it has to say
about being modern. After working with the uranium-rich ore called pitchblende,
Blanche got radiation poisoning; she eventually had both legs and one left arm
amputated. She moved around on a wagon and lived in Marie's Paris apartment,
where she died in 1913. (Curie died in 1938 of radiation sickness.) Blanche kept
several notebooks, collectively entitled The Book of Questions, in which she
revealed her obsession with love, first stoked years before by the doctor who
treated her for hysteria at age 18, J.M. Charcot—the renowned head of
Salpêtrière Hospital (Paris's asylum for mad women) whose public experiments
were duly absorbed by the young Sigmund Freud. As Enquist fancifully,
lugubriously and rapturously riffs on, extends, and wonders after the notebooks
(which really exist), Blanche, Marie (suffering the scandal of her adulterous
relationship with Paul Langevin) and the conflicted Charcot get alternating POV
chapters, and the modern sensibility that sprang from her body—scientifically
scrutinized and dissected, but ever resistant to being known or
possessed—emerges beautifully.
Availability: Usually ships in 5~10 business days.
 | |||||||||
 |
| ||||||||
Can't
find what you're looking for?
