- Paperback: 295 pages
- Publisher: Chronicle Books; New edition edition (April 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0811832082
- ISBN-13: 978-0811832083
- Product Dimensions: 22 x 13.8 x 2.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 621 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #632,067 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Helen Martin, an art historian who's particularly taken with medical illustrations, has left the New World in search of her mysteriously absent husband, Martin Evans. The two have been apart many times before (he's a journalist after all), but this time no one, not even his mother, knows where he has gone. The novel begins with the feverish Helen snaking by train across Europe on the way to Martin's last known location, Vienna. Along the way, she becomes entangled in a plot involving a murder in an anatomical art museum.
This sounds, at first glance, like the premise of a run-of-the-mill missing-persons detective story. But Barbara Hodgson embellishes this simple tale with a baroque narrative style that suggests a symbolic order to Helen's anxious search. The mystery entwines with Helen's metaphysical and emotional quest for solace after the death of her relationship. Helen becomes obsessed with bodies--her own and those of her fellow travelers: "Helen woke up wearing someone else's eyes. Eyes that shattered her orbs into a thousand piercing splinters, that shook her balance off its pivot and flung her headlong into a mercurial fog." In several similar waking scenes, Helen imagines her breasts swelling and shrinking or her body parts mingling with others' as they look on. Throughout the book, she sees and feels and tastes and touches with fine-grained detail, and her bizarre body consciousness moves so easily from a dreamlike fantasy back into the prose of the mystery narrative that a dogmatic reader is apt to become frustrated if he or she demands a dogged pursuit of clues and solutions. But straightforward mystery is not Hodgson's method. The intersubjectivity of her characters is drawn in a poetic language that, like the exquisite and macabre color illustrations interlaced with the text, are meant to estrange sensory experiences and evoke consciousness of embodied existence. Hodgson's first book, The Tattooed Map (1995), was a similarly rich book of illustrations and intelligent prose, but The Sensualist is a more robust novel, a sophisticated artistic achievement that represents a significant literary talent. --Patrick O'Kelley --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
Now in paperback, this potent mystery draws readers into a tangle of lost loves, vengeance, and murder. Set in the dark world of a European winter, and illuminated with Barbara Hodgson's haunting illustrations, The Sensualist is a visual and literary exploration of the limitations of looking and the boundless power of seeing.
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First Sentence
Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else's breasts. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else's breasts. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
This book will make a good paperweight,
By "genome28" (Tel. no. 9745-2796 Hong Kong) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Sensualist (Paperback)
I saw this book without the benefit of a review. I am drawn to typography and graphic design and this book looks well-designed so I bought it. I even enjoy the foldouts.But, of course, as expected the novelty of the design wore out and I decided to read it - after all, isn't that exactly what we do with books? Read them? First chapter I am already trying to control my gag response. Two chapters more and my suspicion is verified - this is a terribly written book. Terrible in the sense that it is so self-indulgent. The fantastic element starts becoming so contrived and has called attention to itself. In time, the plot wobbles shamelessly. All the author's efforts in trying to prevent the story from coming out wickedly boring and the sentences from sounding badly written fail not with a bang but a whimper. Her sentences could no longer afford to support its own ponderous weight. The center wouldn't hold. The maelstrom of mediocre writing is collapsing upon itself until you wish to drink hemlock or smoke some weed to alleviate your suffering. There is too much suffering in the world already and I will not take it from a failed novelist whose main claim to fame is her talent for parading her impoverished imagination and a talent for expressing it so that you are put to sleep. Enough. Now to get my money's worth I have started cutting up the foldouts from the book and make a decoupage out of them.
3.0 out of 5 stars
An Anatomy Lesson,
By Katie (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Sensualist (Paperback)
The Sensualist is a very beautiful book. The illustrations are both exacting and balanced but the textual representations of the body try to mimic the pictorial and this is where the book begins to falter. The plot is rather haphazard but I didn't mind this - after all, it's a mystery. Helen Martin is searching for her husband but instead finds anatomical drawings. The focus of the novel immediately switches from the huband to the drawings, relating their history and perhaps more about the history of all anatomical illustration than the readre would care to learn. When the lesson gives way to narrative once again the writing becomes centered on the physical and tactile sensations of Helen Martin. This would be a fantastic cinematic effect but somehow just doesn't work in the novel... By the middle of the book I was reading quickly, not even looking at the drawings, just wanting to reach the resolution of the mystery and learn the outcome of Helen's search for her husband. In the end I was pretty disappointed.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
2.9 out of 5 stars (17 customer reviews) 9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
An Anatomy Lesson,
By Katie - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Sensualist (Paperback)
The Sensualist is a very beautiful book. The illustrations are both exacting and balanced but the textual representations of the body try to mimic the pictorial and this is where the book begins to falter. The plot is rather haphazard but I didn't mind this - after all, it's a mystery. Helen Martin is searching for her husband but instead finds anatomical drawings. The focus of the novel immediately switches from the huband to the drawings, relating their history and perhaps more about the history of all anatomical illustration than the readre would care to learn. When the lesson gives way to narrative once again the writing becomes centered on the physical and tactile sensations of Helen Martin. This would be a fantastic cinematic effect but somehow just doesn't work in the novel... By the middle of the book I was reading quickly, not even looking at the drawings, just wanting to reach the resolution of the mystery and learn the outcome of Helen's search for her husband. In the end I was pretty disappointed. 9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Strangely involving, unnecesarily weird,
By Emilia Palaveeva "ema-in-seattle" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Sensualist (Paperback)
After the first 50 pages, the books suddenly draws you in. Helen is in search of her husband, so she can put an end to a dead marriage. Following his steps, she becomes teh center of a strange mystery, sought after by weird characters whose interst in her is never quite explained. The novel is a page-turner. The descriptions of European cities is detailed and alive. However, a lot of circumstances remain unclear. The reader is left with a lot of whys and how comes. Yet, that said, the novel is so unique that is worth the read. 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Helen through the Looking Glass,
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Sensualist: A Novel (Hardcover)
Helen Martin, an anatomical artist, goes to Europe to search for her missing estranged husband. Along the way she gets sidetracked by some odd and perhaps supernatural characters who have their own plans for her. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, this is light, whimsical fiction; however, if whimsy is not your thing, you may feel like you're trapped in a bad episode of "Twin Peaks." I personally enjoyed it quite a bit. The ending of this story is more conclusive than Hodgson's last book, The Tattooed Map. Warning to fans of Toy and Movable Books: Although The Sensualist does have several illustrations and fold-outs (I liked the fold-out brain on page 122) this is more of a full-sized novel (295 pages) than the slim The Tattooed Map.
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