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.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Blanche is Blanche Wittman (1859--1913), the most famous patient of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, a crucial mentor to Freud; Marie is Marie Curie (1867-1934), the first person awarded two Nobel Prizes. In the 1890s, Blanche became the Curies' assistant, handling the pitchblende from which Marie eventually isolated radium. Radiation poisoning led to amputations of both of Blanche's legs and her left arm well before her early death. To the end, she was, especially in Enquist's curious novel, whose narrative he often interrupts with personal memories and reflections, Marie's confidante, especially after Pierre Curie's 1906 death and during Marie's illicit affair with married fellow physicist Paul Langevin, which, when revealed, became a scandal with racist overtones (Marie was Polish and accused of being Jewish) that clouded the awarding of her second Nobel. Marie bonded with Blanche because Blanche, too, knew passionate love--perhaps too passionate, the exclamation marks Enquist liberally inserts to suggest various kinds of heavy breathing imply, to quite escape also being ludicrous. The tone of this admittedly absorbing book is piquantly ambivalent.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
