Publisher: Vintage Books (August 1, 2006) Language: English Product Dimensions: 5 x 1 x 7.8 inches
Book Description Publication Date: August 1, 2006
What is it to be human? This question, as in Birdsong, is at the heart of Human Traces.The story begins in Brittany where a young, poor boy somehow passes his medical exams and goes to Paris, where he attends the lectures of Charcot, the Parisian neurologist who set the world on its head in the 1870s. With a friend, he sets up a clinic in the mysterious mountain district of Carinthia in south-east Austria.If The Girl at the Lion d’Or was a simple three-movement symphony, Birdsong an opera, Charlotte Gray a complex four-movement symphony and On Green Dolphin Street a concerto, then Human Traces is a Wagnerian grand opera.From BooklistIt\'s daunting to begin a lengthy novel on the early history of psychiatry, but Faulks\' latest (after Green Dolphin Street) is less stodgy than this description suggests. In 1880, Jacques Rebiere, a Breton medical student, meets young Englishman Thomas Midwinter at a resort in Deauville, France. They\'re overjoyed to discover a mutual fascination with the human mind, \"the meeting point between thought and flesh.\" Over the next 35 years, with the help of Thomas\' sister, Sonia, they single-mindedly pursue their goal: to run a clinic that will cure, not merely house, the mentally ill. Their mission takes them from the overcrowded Salpetriere Hospital in Paris to the mountains of Austria, and from California\'s Sierra Madres to the dry African plains, where the earliest humans walked; when describing physical landscapes, Faulks\' prose is sublime. He shapes his characters\' personalities with a surgeon\'s gentle precision, but with voluminous pages of case notes and lectures, the novel hardly wears its research lightly. Continually fascinating despite its density, this intellectual epic explores the uneasy relationship between madness and humanity. Sarah JohnsonCopyright ? American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
以下为对购买帮助不大的评价