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The sensualist: A novel
  
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The sensualist: A novel (Hardcover)

de Barbara Hodgson (Author)
2.0étoiles sur 5  Voir tous les commentaires (2 évaluations de client)

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From Amazon.com

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 an alternate Hardcover edition.



Product Description

On a night train from Munich to Vienna, Helen Martin discovers, quite literally, that she is losing her senses. Sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste - all are disappearing, and her own body parts are taking on unfamiliar characteristics. The author of The Tattooed Map has created a mystery cum love story with a brain that weaves together the unseemly history of anatomical art with a gruesome modern-day murder. A visual and literary sortie into the realm of the body, The Sensualist is a potent mystery about the limitations of looking and the boundless power of seeing. Helen's search takes her through the capitals of Europe and from the sixteenth century to the Second World War to last winter. But her real journey lies within, as each of her five senses comes alive with catastrophic acuity. A deftly woven conundrum of art forgery, thievery, and connoisseurship, The Sensualist is also the chronicle of a ruinous love affair and the history of a lost body. --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
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2 évaluations
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1.0étoiles sur 5 This book will make a good paperweight, Oct. 4 2002
Par "genome28" (Tel. no. 9745-2796 Hong Kong) - Voir tous mes commentaires
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.

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3.0étoiles sur 5 An Anatomy Lesson, Aoû 8 2002
Par Katie (Brooklyn, NY United States) - Voir tous mes commentaires
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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