At age nine, first misdiagnosed and finally identified as having facial bone cancer (Ewing’s sarcoma), Lucy underwent several surgeries and more than two years of intensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Pain and nausea, anxiety and fear of more pain and nausea were only part of the ordeal. The young Lucy became aware of what it is to be severely, chronically ill. Her sisters behaved differently toward her: they were polite. “Suddenly I understood the term visiting. I was in one place, they were in another, and they were only pausing.” Even her father felt uncomfortable at her hospital bedside, and Lucy was relieved that he came infrequently.

But being at home was worse: in the hospital the other patients and the staff expected little from her and she felt no guilt or shame; amidst her family, she blamed herself for the tension, arguments over money, and her mother’s depression, even though these elements had existed prior to her illness. Her hair fell out and she became dimly aware that people were staring at her face. Nevertheless, “I . . . was naturally adept at protecting myself from the hurt of their insults and felt a vague superiority . . . . “

Well enough to return to school, Lucy’s disfigured face drew taunts from classmates; she understood finally that she was perceived as ugly and that she would not be loved. Only on Halloween, when she could mask her face, did she feel free and joyful, unconcerned about her appearance, “normal.” Her moods now alternated between despair, determination, and escapism. She became convinced that only facial reconstruction and a restored appearance would make life bearable.

During years of reconstructive surgery Lucy evolved complex rationalizations to give meaning to her suffering. Two anchors had stabilized her existence throughout the misery: a passionate adolescent love of horses, and an adult love of poetry. Eventually outward appearance and inner life became harmonious. “The journey back to my face was a long one.”

Unfortunately, Lucy’s story does not end here. At age 39 she committed suicide. Soon after, her close friend, writer Ann Patchett, wrote a book about their friendship, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, published in 2003 (HarperPerennial).

Lucy Grealy Interview in 1994 (20 Min.)

Autobiography of a Face
Lucy Grealy
Houghton Mifflin 1994 Boston: 256 pages

1995 Whiting Award Winner in Nonfiction , Poetry: https://www.whiting.org/awards/winners/lucy-grealy
Web image generated from the book cover by Medhum.

Based on the novel of the same name by André Aciman, this multilingual film took the world by storm, using three languages (French, Italian, and English) in the first five minutes. The resulting language barriers add to feelings of yearning established by the musical score, whose key elements originate from Sufjan Stevens (Futile Devices; Mystery of Love; Visions of Gideon). Music, language, and literature carry the work’s primary themes, namely those of precocity and sexuality. Elio embodies all three—his main hobbies include transcribing music, playing the piano, and reading. These themes are further captured by the symbol of the apricot, its relationship to precocity and sexuality explicitly discussed in the film. Furthermore, the denouement of the film, arrives through a figuratively rich and overtly sensual scene involving Elio and the summer stand-in of the apricot, the peach, (1:34:30-1:40:24), beautifully capturing the relationship between Elio’s intellectual maturity and emotional naïveté.

Controversy surrounds Call Me by Your Name, primarily regarding consent and age statutes. Although Elio is over the 1983 age of consent in Italy and most United States jurisdictions, his relationship with Oliver evokes discomfort. This speaks to the historical Western perception of gay relationships as predatory. Nonetheless, their relationship warrants some skepticism, particularly regarding age-based power dynamics. The Perlmans support and watch over their son as the relationship progresses, frequently checking in and pointing him to literary passages as points of reference. In this way, the film navigates a complicated and loaded social topic, particularly in the queer community.

Further depth is added by considering the historical context of the early 1980s. By 1983, the AIDS epidemic had globally taken hold, the virus only identified in France the May prior to the events of the film. “Gay cancer” was a widely used term for a rare and defining symptom of AIDS, singling out the Western community hardest hit at that time. The merciless, viral specter of death overshadowed the gay liberation movement of the previous decade. HIV is never mentioned in the film, but its presence must be known by Oliver, adding to his own hesitations and fears about his and Elio’s sexualities. 1983 was also rife with relevant political fallout: Gerry Studds––the first openly gay member of Congress––became embroiled in a scandal involving a relationship with a 17-year-old, and Bettino Craxi was elected as Italian Prime Minister, eventually leading to the collapse of the modern Italian political machine. Craxi plays a central role in the peripheral events of the film, his influence appearing on television and in conversations with dinner guests.

Call Me by Your Name is an evocative masterpiece, one of the few movies that I can watch repeatedly (cf. Heated Rivalry). Despite my inherent preference for novels, this film, far and away, manifests a beauty missing from its literary inspiration. The actors perform splendidly, the music deepens the emotional journey, and the cinematography transports the audience perfectly to the setting. Every time I watch it, I discover greater depth and fall in love with it more, even if I can never look at a peach the same way.

Call Me by Your Name 
Director: Luca Guadagnino 
Screenplay: James Ivory 
Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay (Critics’ Choice Awards); Best Male Lead [Chalamet] & Best Cinematography (Independent Spirit Awards); Outstanding Film-Wide Release (GLAAD Media Awards); Best Editing (Nastro d’Argento Awards & Golden Ciak Awards); Breakout Actor [Chalamet] (Gotham Independent Film Awards & Hollywood Film Awards)
Year 2017 
Studio Sony Pictures Classics 
Running Time (in minutes) 132 
Based on Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman 

Web image from Sony Pictures.

Shortly before the outbreak of The Great War, a young engineering student arrives at a tuberculosis sanitorium high in the mountains of Central Europe. Over the course of his visit there he will share many meals (and drinks) with some of the other patients, a group which will include among others a Catholic conservative and a liberal humanist; there will be long, leisurely after-dinner discussions of varied philosophical topics; temperature charts will be compared; and he will become intrigued by a mysterious woman who is also a patient.  

And no, this is not The Magic Mountain. 

The Empusium is the latest novel from the Nobel- and International Booker Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. The author subtitles her book “A Health Resort Horror Story,” which is exactly what it is. But it is a horror story which the author has cleverly folded into not just the setting of Thomas Mann’s novel, but the setting and certain elements of the plotline, all of them slightly altered, but recognizable. In fact, recognizing them is part of the fun of this well-plotted, rather Gothic tale. 

As the novel opens Mieczysław Wojnich, a young Pole from Łwów, has arrived at the tuberculosis sanitorium at Gӧbersdorf, in Lower Silesia (currently Poland, formerly Prussia), to be treated for his illness. There is no room at the main building, so he is assigned a room at Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, where he meets his fellow (male) patients, who come from various Central European cities and differing viewpoints, but who seem to agree on one thing: the general inferiority of women. Philosophical discussions, which often take place over or after leisurely meals and the consumption of a magic mushroom-laced liqueur called Schwӓrmerei, range widely over several topics (war, language, the nature of reality) but most of the time are intensely misogynistic—what is the purpose of women? Do women have smaller brains than men? Do women’s bodies belong to the State? Have any great discoveries ever been made by women? Should women even be educated at all? (Tokarczuk helpfully includes an appendix to the novel in which she notes that all of the quotes of her characters on this subject are paraphrased from quotes by well-known prominent authors of the past, from Augustine of Hippo to William Butler Yeats)  

Things at the sanitorium go badly from the beginning of Wojnich’s stay. He stumbles upon the dead body of a woman laid out on a table, who turns out to be the wife of the guesthouse proprietor, and his companions tell him surreptitiously that she may have been murdered. He hears noises—voices—coming from empty rooms, and cries in the night from outside the guesthouse. An art student who is terminally ill confides that “people die here,” and not just from tuberculosis; every November, apparently, a young man disappears in the surrounding woods, only to have his body turn up ripped to pieces. And what exactly is going on with those woodsmen in the forest, anyway? 

The Empusium works on many levels. It is an homage to The Magic Mountain, but it is definitely not a retelling of The Magic Mountain. The allusions to Mann’s novel are multiple: the pre-World War I setting at a sanitorium in both novels; the fact that both Mieczysław Wojnich and Hans Castorp are engineering students; the philosophies of Settembrini and Naphtha in the Mountain, analogous to the conservative and humanist positions taken in The Empusium; the close childhood relationship between Castorp and Pribislav Hippe (Mountain) and Wojnich and Anatoly (Empusium), in each case bonding over a pencil. And as in The Magic Mountain, there is a narrator who occasionally breaks the fourth wall; verb tenses in The Empusium shift repeatedly from third-person singular past tense to first-person plural present. These are not subtle, nor are they intended to be.  

Allusions aside, The Empusium is its own story, and a totally different narrative. It is a horror story, a revenge story, a wryly feminist tale of the supernatural set in a place hopefully of healing but also of chronic illness and the ever-present specter of death. Tokarczuk builds suspense slowly, bit by bit, with increasing tension. Almost from the beginning there is the undeniable sensation that something is very wrong at Gӧbersdorf, although it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is. Wojnich often has the feeling that he is being watched. The story line draws from a tradition of folk horror, and specifically from the notion that bad things can happen to “city people” when they are out in the country, among the “old ways.”  

The Empusium is also more than just a horror story, and an important aspect relates to the misogynistic attitudes mentioned earlier. Tokarczuk takes a position on the nature of male-female relations (perhaps the use of a sanitorium as the setting is meant to suggest that misogyny is an illness infecting educated society). In this book “civilization” seems to be identified with maleness, and maleness is located in the sanitorium and the guesthouse, a controlled environment with its dining rooms and drawing rooms and intellectual conversation—and in the medical world, since this is a facility for medical treatment— and it is here that women are demeaned. The forest, on the other hand, is the home of the Tuntschi, female figures created by laborers out of sticks and moss and other forest detritus. It is a place both beautiful and enchanting—and dangerous. Men venture into the (female) forest, and the forest—in the form of the Schwӓrmerei, which Wojnich describes as redolent of mushrooms, moss, and earth—is brought into the guesthouse; boundaries are porous. Male and female, the guesthouse and the forest each have their secrets…and Wojnich is the last to know. But Wojnich has a secret of his own.   

And the title? A word created by the author. Empusa, in Greek mythology, was a shape-shifting female spirit who seduced young men, drank their blood, then devoured them.  

The Empusium
Olga Tokarczuk 
Riverhead/Penguin Random House, New York, 2022 
302 pp. 

Web photo by Marek Piwnicki 

What makes The Magician so unique as a novel is its depiction of writing as an all-encompassing creative activity that consumes the author’s full psychic energy and that emerges out of his personal struggles as an individual. It would be impossible to affix The Magician to the back cover of all editions of Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain. Tóibín offers more than a page of scholarly references to help a reader gain background knowledge about Mann, his life, and the times. But if you are interested in what it might have been like for Thomas Mann to compose these monumental works, Tóibín’s book might offer the best entry point into Mann’s artistic mind and his creative persona.  

The novel covers the full panorama of Mann’s life, from his somewhat pampered childhood in Lübeck, Germany, to his final years spent in the German expatriate community of Los Angeles. The writer’s camera is laser focused on ground level details and refuses to zoom out to the big picture and lose its granular tone. The texture of the bourgeois lifestyle of the Mann family is captured in all its minutia including rowdy family meals, community engagements, and professional insults. One can almost feel the temperature rise and the climate change as Mann and his family move from Munich to Princeton and finally to Pacific Palisades. Mann exerted very tight control over his daily routine and one senses his absence on the page as he withdraws to his private study every morning after breakfast to write without any interruptions. We are excluded from this sanctuary just like his wife and children as they waited for him to emerge after lunch for his afternoon walk and some playtime with them.

Mann was more than a prominent novelist. He was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, globally recognized and one of the most famous personalities of his time. He hobnobbed with dignitaries and the leading figures of the pre-World War II era, including Einstein and FDR. They parade across the pages of the novel with all their foibles and idiosyncrasies. Tóibín details Mann’s tempestuous relationship with Agnes Meyer, a leading figure in high society along the New York-Washington DC corridor. I had to look her up to learn that she was a well-known journalist and civil right activist and Katherine Graham’s mother to appreciate her impact on the world during the 1930s and 40s. 

The most striking feature of the book is the intimate recounting of Mann’s tortured struggles with his sexual orientation, which infiltrated his fiction from the very beginning of his career. He never denied his homoerotic longings and Tóibín delicately describes the many occasions during his long life when Mann was overwhelmed with desire for a particular man and his secretive attempts to act on his cravings. But he was a man of his era and was forced to submerge his identity as a gay man most of the time. The emotional cost of a life lived closeted on the one hand, and as the married father of six children on the other, is readily apparent. Reading The Magician motivated me to reread Death in Venice and made me realize the courage it must have taken for Mann to portray Aschenbach’s tragic story in such complex but precise prose, to reify his own emotional turmoil without sanctimony or defensiveness. Tóibín’s prose is the ideal conduit to channel the roiling interface between the Mann of the larger world and the inner literary mind of a flesh and bones historical human being. 

The Magician is an engrossing reading experience that also has special salience for followers of the MedHum website, which explores the role of the individual in a changing society. A key element that drives the narrative forward is Mann’s engagement with the political developments in Germany over the long period spanning from the lead-in to World War I, to the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 and again in September 1939 and the devastating war years, and ending with the rebuilding of his native country. At the start, Mann saw himself as heir to a tradition of German intellectual excellence and nobility. He took great pride in his country and patriotically defended the decision to go to war against France, Britain, and Russia in August 1914. However, he recognized the dangers posed by the Nazi seizure of power and openly decried the degradation of public life. Mann felt the Nazi destruction of the German cultural heritage as a personal betrayal. Mann recognized early on the brutality of the antisemitic legislation and the attacks on his Jewish colleagues. He was forced to weigh loyalty to country against the defense of universal humanistic principles and he struggled to find a path forward between these competing ideals.  

As Hitler rose to power, were Mann’s instincts right that this would bring calamity to Germany, or should he have had trust in his fellow citizens that things would right themselves? How much could Mann rely on his interpretation of unfolding political events and his prediction of what the future would look like? Once the Nazis consolidated their dictatorial control of the Reich and set out on a course for total war and extermination of the Jews, should Mann have been a strident and outspoken opponent of the regime or should he have worked more discreetly behind the scenes? Should he have remained in Germany and risked his own life and the safety of his family, especially his wife’s Jewish relatives, or sought refuge in America, where he could serve as a champion of cultural enlightenment and world peace? How does one weigh the facts and decide on an effective course of moral action? How does one choose among imperfect options? 

Like all of us, Mann was forced to anticipate events and make painful decisions—decisions that would play out over time and have consequences for others– in real time and with only partial or inaccurate data. Much like the case with physicians and other health care professionals, most of these decisions will work out well, some will be imperfect, and a few will even be wrong. Tóibín’s novel, history as fiction, vividly illustrates the human predicament of living while moving forward with uncertainty and anxiety because full clarity only comes in retrospect — something that doctors understand because they experience it nearly every day in encounters with their patients.  

The Magician – Reading by Colm Tóibín & Conversation with Friedhelm Marx at the Thomas Mann House 

The Magician: A Novel 
Colm Tóibín 
New York: Scribner, 2021, 512 pages  

Photo of Thomas Mann generated from Wikicommon Photos

Junger’s memoir, In My Time of Dying, begins with a vivid account of that potentially fatal event. An aneurysm of a mid-sized artery in his pancreas had burst, causing unchecked internal bleeding. At the hospital, Junger slipped into hypotension, hypothermia, and semi-consciousness before surgical repair, which gave him a last minute surgical “save.”  

However, the main focus of Junger’s memoir is his experience of coming “face-to-face with an afterlife.” In the hospital, his dead father appeared to him. His father “exuded reassurance and seemed to be inviting me to go with him.” (p. 37) While this was happening, Junger recalls being awake and speaking to a doctor. Much that follows is a sustained reflection on the meaning of near-death experiences, drawing on the published literature, anecdotal accounts, as well as his own encounter with dying. 

He recounts the story of Tyler Carroll, a combat medic in Afghanistan, who was critically wounded and, as he was near death, “his whole life presented itself to him simultaneously and in great detail, as if twenty-one years of experience could exist outside linear time.” (p. 80) This so-called “life review,” is a common feature of such experiences, as well as encountering deceased loved ones, hovering outside the body, moving through a tunnel of light, and “being filled with love and bliss.” (p. 82) Junger is particularly impressed with the feelings of universal unity, often followed by a profound change in patients’ perspectives on the meaning of life. In the bibliography, he cites dozens of studies documenting the prevalence and characteristics of such phenomena.  

The author was initially skeptical, “Was I blessed by special knowledge or cursed by it?” (p. 93) He first considers the view of most neuroscientists that near-death experiences are hallucinations created by the dying brain, “The overwhelming likelihood is that our sense of another reality is just a comforting illusion that helps us live our lives.” (p. 118) He then considers the minority report, i.e. well-structured visions and thought processes, along with specific memories of external events (e.g. happenings in the room) raise a number of perplexing questions about the functioning of an oxygen-starved brain.  

We have absolutely no idea how the interior world of subjectivity arises from electrical impulses in the brain. Subjectivity exists, although nothing we know about the most basic components of the universe as we know it—quarks, electrons, waves, fields—permits it. Consequently, the belief that further research on the brain itself will yield a key to consciousness must be mistaken. Junger sums up the situation, “Our understanding of reality might be as limited as a dog’s understanding of television.” (p. 118)  

Junger points out that reality at the deepest level (i.e. the quantum world) is full of paradoxes and seeming impossibilities. It fails to answer many questions about the universe, in addition to the origin of mental phenomena. Consequently, he provisionally accepts the philosophical theory of panpsychism, i.e. “consciousness is woven into the very structure of matter” (p. 136) In other words, every component (e.g. quarks, fields) of the universe has a mental aspect, as well as a physical one. (I might interject here that panpsychism is not a prevalent theory among philosophers of mind, because they believe it raises more problems than it solves.) Given this framework, Sebastian Junger concludes that human consciousness might continue after death as part of a universal consciousness. From the text, I don’t think he believes this afterlife would necessarily retain a sense of individual identity.  

My Time of Dying is a thoughtful reflection on the meaning of life from a man who has experienced a close encounter with death. Junger has created a compelling narrative, making his memoir worth reading whether you believe near-death psychic phenomena point the way toward an afterlife, or think they are hallucinations generated by the dying brain.  

1. Van Lommel P, R. van Wees, V. Meyers, and I Elfferich. Near Death Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands. Lancet 358 (2001): 2039=2045 

2. Parnia S. and P. Fenwick. Near Death Experiences in Cardiac Arrest: Visions of a Dying Brain or Visions of a New Science. Resuscitation 52, no. 1 (2002): 5-11 

In My Time of Dying
Sebastian Junger
New York, Simon & Shuster, 2024, 162 pp.
http://www.sebastianjunger.com/in-my-time-of-dying 
Web photo byu Sebastien Gabriel

The action in James, which is told in the first person, follows a good part of Twain’s story line. James, a slave, overhears that he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans and separated from his wife and family, so he flees his owner’s home and hides on a small island in the Mississippi River to buy time and plan. Meanwhile, Huck’s father, a violent alcoholic, has returned to town, and to get away from him, Huck has faked his own death, has run away from home, and is also sheltering on the same island. Together Huck and James flee down the Mississippi on a raft. With Huck thought to be dead and the runaway James presumed to be his killer, James realizes that Huck’s safety and survival are the only proofs of his innocence.   

Many of the episodes of Twain’s novel are here, but when James and Huck become separated, James’s independent narrative begins. He is left in the service of a blacksmith, where his singing attracts the attention of a leader of a minstrel troupe, who purchases him. But to perform, James must first be made up as a white man and then wear blackface. The troupe also contains a light-skinned black man passing as white, who befriends James and runs away with him. They wind up on a crowded riverboat and James discovers that Huck is on the same boat. The ship’s boiler explodes, the ship capsizes, and James must decide to save either his friend or Huck. He saves Huck (there are multiple reasons for this) and then sets about trying to return home to find his family and get them to safety…and freedom. 

James is often funny, but it is not light. Separation of families, whippings, and killings are presented as the backdrop to daily life—which renders them even more horrible. However, Everett is not just interested in retelling the Huck Finn story from another character’s viewpoint; he is interested in telling a different story: James’s. Turning the racial dynamic upside down, Everett’s slaves speak perfect English among themselves, but purposely revert to deep stereotypical dialect when around white people. They understand that by code-switching in this way they are giving the whites what they want and expect; to do otherwise would challenge the rigid social hierarchy and thus put the slaves in grave danger. Their use of dialect keeps them relatively safe, and importantly, helps them maintain a kind of control of the situation. When you have so little, a secret is a powerful thing. 

For much of the book is about power. There is a wonderful scene early in the novel where James is holding a class for slave children in which he drills them on the way they must speak around whites: 

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way, and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say when they don’t feel ‘superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.” 

The children then proceed to enumerate the rules: don’t make eye contact, never speak first, never address any subject directly when talking to another slave. The correct way to report a fire in the kitchen is not “Fire, fire!”, but “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”—because “…we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.” In this and other sections Everett lets us peek behind a curtain to see Black resistance in action. He also makes us see beyond Twain’s literary stereotype to understand the enslaved Black characters as fully formed people: aware, articulate, clever, and possessed of deep emotional lives, creators of a complex society within the general society of the time and place. Everett isn’t interested in the myth of the long-suffering, infinitely patient, preternaturally wise servant, except to explode it.  

James suggests that it is the control of the tools of the intellect—primarily spoken language (though James can read and write as well)—that is ultimately the slaves’ power and their defense. Denying the enslaved an education was, of course, a way of keeping them down, and many in the South fought hard to maintain this status quo. James’s treasured possessions are a book, a notebook, and a pencil, and the code-switching mentioned above is not merely a defense, but a way in which white masters can be manipulated.  

Besides education, Everett explores another source of power (or its lack): skin color, its implications and, despite the rigid social system, its malleability. Beyond the primary black/white power implications of the antebellum South, we have in the minstrel performance section white men in blackface, a black man “passing” as white who dons blackface, and a black man who must be made up to look white before he can put on blackface. There is even a biracial character in the novel, who shows up so unexpectedly that the reader is left to wonder about the author’s motivation here; is he saying this is far more common than anyone thought? Is he sending up the Great American Novel? Saying that the black and white roots of American history—and literature— are more inextricably commingled than we could imagine? Everett doesn’t expound on this but leaves us to hypothesize. 

 Perhaps the most obvious signifier of power in the novel is in the title. The protagonist is not James, the name the white world—his enslaver—calls him. but James, the name he chooses for himself. At one point he is told to identify himself:  

He is not someone’s property, no longer to be identified by a name someone else has given him. He has chosen this name, and the ability to name (see the children’s discussion above) is a power in itself. 

James is brilliant, clever, eminently readable, a tale of personal victory and an emotionally rich yet biting commentary on the dynamics of race relations. It is also grimly serious in its portrayal of the horrors of daily life for enslaved people in the antebellum South. Everett starts with Twain’s work and takes it in another direction, with another voice heard from. James’s intelligence, humanity, and determination run through the entire novel; in Everett’s telling, James is not simply Huck’s long-suffering sidekick, the good loyal companion who is ultimately liberated—literally—by Huck and Tom Sawyer. James has his own agenda, and though he may be bought and sold, he is at no time a pawn. He is hyperaware of his situation and always searching for a way to accomplish his ends; he has agency. Near the novel’s end we even have a Biblical moment where James brings down a cataclysm upon his enslavers and leads his people to freedom.  

A retelling of Huckleberry Finn, indeed. 

James is shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Nonso Anozie reads an excerpt:

James
Percival Everett 
Doubleday, New York
320 pp (hardcover) 

Feature image by Guille Pozzi

For nearly two decades after the fatwa was issued, his literary career flourished, and he became a visible spokesperson for freedom of artistic expression. As president of PEN, Rushdie promoted initiatives to protect and promote the careers of writers living in fear under repressive political regimes. In August 2022, he was invited to speak on this topic at the Chatauqua Institution, an adult education and social movement. On a sunny summer morning, as he sat on the stage of the amphitheater to begin a public conversation with his interlocutor at Chatauqua, he noticed a man dressed in black suddenly rise up from the middle of the audience and charge the platform. There was no security at Chatauqua that day or any other day because the violent world had never intruded into the bucolic space of the institution during its entire 148 year history. Rushdie found himself rooted to the spot, frozen and unprepared to defend himself as the attacker stabbed him seventeen times – in his eye, his face, his neck, his chest, his abdomen, his hand. Heroic people charged the stage and subdued the assailant. Miraculously, Rushdie survived and he was helicoptered to the nearest trauma center for emergency treatment. Knife is a meditation on the event, the ordeal of rehabilitation that Rushdie had to endure, and his reaction now that he is healed, and his life is restored.

Knife is a visceral book that is grounded in the harsh reality of crazed, religious zealots and painful, tedious rehabilitation. It is different from the magical prose that characterizes much of Rushdie’s writing. The events are described in excruciating detail. One can feel the hurt and sense the worry etched into the pages. It is testament to the many doctors and nurses and therapists who took part in his bodily reconstruction and long convalescence. Most of all it is an inspiring testament to his wife who had the fortitude to be at his bedside throughout the entire ordeal . Rushdie gives her most of the credit for his stamina, the tenacity and resilience that he displayed during the long months after the attack. He substitutes an imaginary dialogue with his attacker in lieu of a face-to-face encounter in prison to express his contempt for his religious intolerance. Rushdie and his wife summon the courage to revisit the Chautauqua stage one year after the attack and achieve some degree of closure on the event.

There is much humanity and wisdom in these pages, lessons on how to confront and overcome adversity. One might question what we, mere mortals, can learn from a singular person like Rushdie who was blessed with such an abundance of human and professional resources to draw on as he recuperated from his injuries. However, differences in fame and access to expertise do not ultimately carry the day. Instead, it is how we as individuals, regardless of our wealth or social status, are able to tap our inner strength and utilize the help and support of our loved ones. The task for us all is to draw on our cognitive and psychological reserves and convert life-threatening tragedies into surmountable setbacks. If, like Rushdie, we succeed, then we will have reached a more mature and meaningful embrace of life in all its beauty and complexity. Rushdie’s story played out in the international limelight. The narrative also unfolds every day on countless hospital floors and rehabilitation units the world over as people strive to overcome injury and illness in their own private world. Rushdie’s template is universal.

But for readers of the Medhum website, I suggest that there is an unspoken but instructive message lurking in Rushdie’s story, specifically for health care providers, doctors and nurses both. There were unexpected turns of events during Rushdie’s recovery. It was not an uninterrupted march from near death to healing. He experienced disabling complications from medications that were prescribed for rational clinical reasons, iatrogenic problems. In one case, severe urinary retention requiring repeated painful bladder catheterization, it was only through the astute observation of one of the clinicians that the causative medication was stopped and the problem spontaneously resolved. In another, he experienced symptomatic hypotension, a disabling side effect of one of the drugs prescribed for him. There was a cancer scare when an imaging study performed to assess his urological problems. suggested he might have a lesion in his prostate. He experienced excruciating pain when his eyelids needed to be sutured together to protect his injured eye. In each case, Rushdie was reassured that things were proceedings according to plan and that things should improve with time. Follow up tests were done to monitor the prostate anomaly and confirm improvement in his symptoms but the discomfort and unease lingered in his body and his mind. The anxiety that the problems might not resolve was ever present in Rushdie’s consciousness. 

Doctors know that recovery from injury or illness is a time consuming process that rarely occurs overnight. They are right to encourage their patients to take the long view of their health problems, to reassure them the treatment is usually a continuing proposition. But even for a highly intelligent patient like Rushdie, the doctor’s confidence in how things were going could never completely allay the fear that his broken body would not heal, and his health would not be restored to what it had been pre-knife attack. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for groundbreaking studies that explored how people assess loss and gain and make financial decisions. Kahneman expanded on their studies in behavioral economics and proposed that rational thought utilizes two operational modes. System 1 is rapid and instinctive in contrast to system 2 which is slower, more deliberative, and more reasonable. Channeling this work by Kahneman, there may be two systems operating during recovery from bodily injury. Doctors may be employing an analog System 2 method of thought as the disease is steadily halted, reversed, and repaired. Patients, however, live through illness in a binary System 1 approach of thought: sick or back to normal. We physicians would do well to remember that the only words our patients really want to hear from us when they come to us for care are, “You are now fine. We can stop the medications and stop the follow up. You are back to normal.”

Knife
Salman Rushdie
Knopf 2024, 209 pages

Paul Harding uses this disquieting episode as the basis for his latest novel, The Other Eden. Harding is the author of Tinkers, his debut novel which was published in 2009 by Bellevue Literary Press. That book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, a unique achievement for a book that had been published well outside of the mainstream. His setting is called Apple Island, and the founders are Benjamin Honey, a freed slave, and his Irish wife Patience Raferty who arrive on the island in 1792. They survive a monstrous storm and flood in 1815 and together with a handful of families build a community that over the next 100 years is able to endure and thrive in the face of the harsh elements that confront them.

The descendants of the Honeys are the most prominent characters in Harding’s narrative. The current matriarch, Esther, spends most of her time brooding in a rocking chair, keeping watch over her family, and vigilantly guarding a secret about her son, Eha. Eha is a carpenter, who partners with another resident on the island to build all of the homes for the residents; this partner is an older man who lives alone sheltered inside a hollowed-out tree and who has carved an intricate circular mural that coils upward along the trunk of his home.  Ethan, Eha’s 15-year old son, is a precociously talented artist who is alert to nature and his surroundings and constantly putting images to paper. His two younger sisters are always on the go and playing with the children of three other families.

The outside world intervenes in this quiet secluded world when a team of officials from the neighboring town of Foxden on the coast comes to Apple Island with a mission — to investigate the health and well-being of the inhabitants. They are primed by an entrenched belief that there are certain people in society who are innately better and the consequent dangers of mixing races and inbreeding over several generations. With this in mind, the town representatives conclude that it is in the best interest of all concerned to condemn the Apple Island village and disperse its inhabitants. This is the only solution that they believe will prevent future generations from being adversely affected by the downward spiral of human intellectual and moral capacity and that will avoid the spread of this social contagion beyond the confines of the island. Interwoven with this depressing storyline, there is an effort by a local minister to rescue Ethan from Apple Island because he is very fair-skinned. He may be able to pass as White and his artistic talent may enable him to overcome his “flawed” racial beginnings. Needless to say, the path to a tragic ending is patiently laid out by the author. But Harding’s genius is to make us appreciate the deep humanity and abiding love that the inhabitants of Apple Island sustain even though they cannot escape the colony’s ultimate demise.

A plot summary cannot do justice to the beauty and power of Harding’s prose. His principal characters are simple people living  a subsistence existence. But they are embedded in a lushly evoked environment, and they are attuned to the rhythms of nature and the cycles of daily human life. The emotions are deeply felt, and the action rings true; the inhabitants of the island are not cardboard heroes or angels. There is a threat of violence lurking just below the surface that can emerge with shattering force when triggered by unexpected events.

Ethan’s story is presented as a complex mixture of personalities and motivations. The minister who comes to Apple Island to tutor the children and who devises the plan to rescue Ethan from life on the island recognizes the remarkable native intelligence of his school-age pupils, one who is literate in Latin, another who has mastered geometry. But he painfully admits in his private journal to deep feelings of revulsion when he is surrounded by the black and mixed race children in school. When Ethan is relocated to the home of a wealthy family on the mainland to continue his art education, he becomes more than friends  with one of the servant girls, Bridget. There is a familiar element to their story, but the last stage is surprising and moving in its depiction of devotion and steadfastness in the face of love and separation. Ethan’s fate is mysterious, but his drawings live on in museum exhibitions.

The underlying motivations of the mainlanders who come to survey the living conditions of the people on Apple Island are clothed in their seemingly noble aspiration of improving the lot of humanity.  They use the language of social Darwinism to defend their eugenics agenda, and this is no simple literary plotline. The eugenics movement in the United States was widespread and widely accepted; the nation became obsessed with the concept of “fitter families” and the dangers of reproduction of the unfit, and over 60,000 “feeble minded” individuals were involuntarily sterilized in early twentieth century America. The horrible consequences of flawed science and mistaken beliefs about biology and intrinsic human worth are made abundantly clear. But Harding’s writing rises above formulaic condemnation or pedantic instruction to the reader. He makes you live the experience and the suffering of the islanders whose humanity is so grossly ignored by the team of experts sent to learn about them and then deal with them.

Many reviewers of The Other Eden have commented on the mythic nature of the book. I think they sell Harding short. I think his accomplishment is far greater. His writing is almost Biblical in nature,  in the sense that Marilynne Robinson describes biblical writing in her recent book Understanding Genesis (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2024). In that work, Robinson marvels at how all of the events that unfold in Genesis occur under divine guidance and plans, yet  the men and women maintain their independence to act and influence their fate. God and  humankind are in a covenantal relationship. Each has the capacity to surprise, to rise above their circumstances, defy expectations and even act out of love and forbearance when circumstances might dictate revenge and retribution. Similarly, Harding’s literary world is infused with the powerful belief in human agency and decency, concepts in direct counterpoint to the biologic determinism to which the mainlanders subscribe

The Other Eden evokes many Biblical narratives and themes. Apple Island grows out of a flood and the inhabitants are dispersed after the decision is made to end the colony. There is demonic evil and the threat of servitude, with the image of an enslaving Pharaoh lurking over the heads of the investigators from Foxden. There is branding at birth, deception of elders, scheming to save a favored child, and banishment of a disgraced woman. Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Pharoah, and Ruth are hovering over the residents of Apple Island. Harding uses all of these archetypal tropes and personalities. But like all good Biblical narratives, the images serve to construct a human world that speaks to all of us. The Other Eden is more than a foundation myth. It is a chronicle of living.

THIS OTHER EDEN
Paul Harding
W.W. Norton and Co.
2023
221 pp (paperback)

Web Photo by Seth Dewey

Cortney Davis: The poems in Blinded Birds are startling and sometimes difficult to read. Can you talk about the process of writing such personal poems–how you considered the idea of “truth” in poetry as you were writing? 

B. Fulton Jennes: The poems in Blinded Birds are 100% autobiographical. One of the book’s reviewers called them “brutally honest,” and many people have told me they needed to stop reading to compose themselves before continuing (I guess that’s a compliment!). The intent was not to shock but, rather, to heal. For me, the only path to that healing was complete, unfiltered honesty. As we say in the program, you’re only as sick as your secrets, and I’d been holding in those poisonous secrets for far too long. Poet Anne Carson might insist that art is not therapy, but it was for me in writing these poems.  

CD:  Blinded Birds is your first poetry collection, but you’ve been writing award winning poems for some time. When did you begin your journey as a poet? 

BFJ: When I was a child my grandmother used to read to me from my father’s copy of A Child’s Garden of Verse; I loved the rhymes and the musicality of the poems. Also, my mom wanted to be a writer when she was in high school. She used to write poems with me in the morning before I went to school. Of course, I took all the credit for them with my teacher! 

CD:  And now you’re writing poems that are like explosions on the page, visceral and stripped-bare. How did you come to write these particular poems? Was there a triggering event? 

BFJ: It was after we discovered my daughter Mallory’s heroin addiction. Mal was home from college and preparing to begin overseas graduate studies when we found her overdosed and, essentially, dead on her bedroom floor. Fortunately, I was able to resuscitate her until the EMTs arrived, so she lived and entered a residential treatment program. But processing all that happened in the months that followed–including Mallory’s subsequent relapse and years of active addiction–threw both my husband and me into a state of perpetual PTSD. It also evoked memories of my own addiction to alcohol, including during Mal’s infancy (I relapsed when her pediatrician advised me to drink beer because my milk production insufficient and she was losing weight. I’m an addict–who was I to argue?). Additionally, she and I have both been treated for depression since childhood (I was on Valium when I was 12, for God’s sake–and Mallory’s depression manifested much earlier), and my mother suffered from horrible depression, most likely untreated bipolar disorder, throughout my childhood. So all of those factors congealed during this period–the memories, the fears, the regrets, the anger, the sorrow. The only way I could manage was to write my way through. 

CD:  Writing the poems must have been an extraordinary experience. Your poems about saving Mallory’s life (“Eating Dinner, After You Died,” “The Waitings”) begin in despair and end in hope. You might have kept these poems to yourself but chose to offer them publically in a collection. How did the publication of this book affect you emotionally and how have the poems affected your family?  

BFJ:  Let’s start with my family, first and foremost my daughter since she is a central character in the collection’s story arc. By the time I was ready to submit Blinded Birds to publishers, Mallory was in relatively long-term recovery–in fact, she had gone to graduate school to become a certified addictions counselor. I would never have published the poems without her permission, and she readily gave it, realizing not only the personal importance of telling our story but also the potential of connecting with others and offering them hope as a result since the final poems in the collection celebrate our joint recovery. Sadly, my mother–the third central character in the book–never achieved relief from her depression before she died. She was of a generation that clung to the belief that depression is a character flaw, not a treatable medical condition–much as addiction is still shrouded in stigma today. My husband was behind the book 100%. The rest of the family, including many who never realized our ongoing struggles with mental illness, were initially shocked but ultimately supportive. We got a lot of, “I’m so sorry–I never knew,” which just shows how well we hid the truth for so long.  

How did the book’s publication affect me emotionally? I think both Mallory and I feel really empowered by having the truth out in the open for others to learn from and, perhaps, glean hope from. Every time I finish a reading, people from the audience approach me to share their stories, especially ones about their own children who suffered, or suffer, from addiction. I can feel the healing they’ve received from knowing they’re not alone. It’s therapeutic for all of us–the giver and the receivers of hope. 

CD: Your poems seem to be “spot on” in examining the cultural and societal issues so many families struggle with today. It has been said that the personal is universal, and your very personal poems speak directly to these issues. Was that something you considered when writing, that your work might help others understand the genesis and effects of addiction? 

BFJ:  It’s only in studying how others react to the poems that I’ve developed a keener awareness of society’s misevaluation of addiction and addicts. However, while drafting the poems, I definitely took a “genetics as culprit” approach. The three of us recently had genetic testing done, which revealed that both Mallory and I have the A1 allele. In study after study, that mutation on the brain’s dopamine receptors has been very closely linked to early-onset depression, severe alcoholism, ADHD, intractable PTSD, and a heightened risk for addiction to opioids. There are two poems at the beginning of the book that highlight the fury I feel at being a victim of genetics: “Blinded Birds” and “To an Allele.” And I wish I could have shared those findings with my mother who no doubt blamed herself rather than her genetic inheritance for her lifelong depression. (Her father was severely alcoholic and despondent; two of her siblings committed suicide.) 

CD: When you understood the genetic component of depression and addiction did you feel relieved somehow of guilt or blame? I very much admire your poem “Triple Helix” that helps you “pry apart the DNA / that twists our fates together . . . .” 

BFJ:  Vindicated, perhaps, but not guiltless. There’s another poem in the book titled “Every Bad Thing That Ever Happened to Me Happened When I Was Drunk,” and that’s pretty much the truth of it. And not just the bad things that happened to me, but the bad things I imposed upon others, most notably my daughter. I relapsed twice during her childhood: once when she was an infant (the poem “Alky Mommy” speaks to that) and again when she was a teen–the two most impressionable periods in a child’s development. During those times, I was unavailable to Mallory on many levels. That’s why there’s so much regret and sorrow mixed with anger in discovering the genetic connection to addiction–my genes might have opened the door for me, but I’m the one who wrecked the room. 

CD: Yet you did not leave the room in shambles. The last several poems in Blinded Birds speak to healing and resolution. In the book’s last poem, “Hovenweep,” you write “And then you, a damaged daughter, saved me. / And then I, a mother damned, saved you.” Do you have a favorite poem among those that bring the book to a close with hope?   

BFJ: Yes! My favorite is “Return,” the second-to-last poem in the collection. I still connect to it, feel its power, whenever I read it. In it, I metaphorically compare recovery to a tree reawakening after a long winter, a long night. Isn’t that exactly what it feels like, the first time you wake up and don’t ache for a drink or a fix? You feel alive again. It’s remarkable. Like being reborn. 

CD: You often give well attended readings. Is it difficult for you to share such emotional and revealing poems?  

BFJ: Not at all. As I’ve mentioned, I can feel the healing that’s happening in the room–both for me and for those in attendance. Sure, there are some who can’t scurry away quickly enough after the reading (!), but I tell myself that they’re the ones who most needed to hear the poems. 

CD: Yes, sometimes we experience something–a poem that cuts too close perhaps–and it’s often only later that we realize how we’ve been touched, been changed. Has writing Blinded Birds changed you or your family in any way?    

BFJ: Personally, I’ve gained confidence on many levels since the book’s publication–as a poet, as a public speaker, as a truth-teller and giver of hope. I’m unafraid–unlike all those years I felt hidden and hurt by the truth. I think everyone in the family feels pretty much the same. 

CD: Once in a lecture years ago at NYU the poet Yehuda Amichai said that in war, poems can’t save us. Do you think poetry can save us? Can it bring about changes in our society?   

BFJ: It certainly has saved me on more than one occasion. So on a personal level, absolutely: poetry saves. But I see the powerful poems being written about the atrocities occurring in so many places today, and while those poems have impacted my sense of urgency and compassion, I don’t see that power playing out on a political level. I think the effect of art–whether poetry, song, or visual art–is limited to moving a pre-disposed audience. Sadly, they “preach to the choir”–albeit powerful and affective preaching. 

CD: And now that Blinded Birds has found wide readership, tell me about your latest book. You’ve written again about your family, but this time about a special and specific person. 

BFJ: Yes–FLOWN (Porkbelly Press, 2024) is an elegy-in-verse for my late sister, who died of metastatic breast cancer in July of 2022. It’s a chapbook of very short poems, written during the final months of Harriet’s illness and the days and weeks just after her passing. It’s raw, very raw. I still relive the anguish of those days when I read the poems. 

CD: how was writing this book different from—or similar to—writing Blinded Birds? 

BFJ: In terms of differences, the biggest one was that FLOWN was written while the events were transpiring, rather than in retrospect. It was a period of deep recollection and reflection, sussing–intuiting really–the metaphoric connections between Harriet’s illness (which we knew from the first diagnosis was terminal) and events from our childhood. There were four years between us, so I learned a great deal from her when we were young, just as she taught me so much about life and about the process of dying with her illness and eventual passing. 

Both books are rich in symbolism, which I guess was the greatest similarity in writing them. The title and title poem of Blinded Birds reference the old Flemish tradition of vinkensport, in which chaffinches being trained to compete in contests that require them to repeat their distinctive song the most times per hour were once blinded with hot needles to minimize distraction during competition. Cruel, right? I used that analogy to illustrate the cruelty of genetics in predetermining our propensity for addiction–and, yes, of any god who would create genetic mutations in the first place and use them for his “sport.” That metaphor echoes through the poems, just as the symbols of holes (including graves) and birds make repeated appearances throughout FLOWN.  

CD:  And one question about your poetic process. Do you have any special inspirations or habits that help you create? Sharon Olds once said that she finds inspiration in walking across water. Some poets have elaborate pre-writing rituals, or must have silence, or can only write at a table at Starbucks.   

BFJ:  For me, it’s hard to find a place quiet enough to write, to achieve that feeling of being completely removed from the world. So I usually draft my poems wearing headphones and listening to either Philip Glass or to theta wave-inducing music online. Both are very hypnotic for me and allow me to reach my Zen place.  

CD:  As one of your fans, I’m grateful for the words and images that arise from your Zen place! Finally, is there a message or a realization that you hope readers will take away after reading Blinded Birds?  

BFJ: First, addiction and depression are genetic “gifts” that no one asks to receive. They are treatable conditions, deserving of society’s and the medical community’s non-judgmental compassion and support, not its dismissal and neglect. Second, there is always, always hope. The path to recovery is fraught with physical and mental anguish, blame-placing, and failure, but keep going. Keep going. Keep going. And help others on their path, too.  

B. Fulton Jennes is Poet Laureate Emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she also served for many years as poet-in-residence at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her poems have appeared in CALYX, Comstock Review, Extreme Sonnets II, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly, and many other journals and anthologies. Jennes’ poem “Glyphs of a Gentle Going” was awarded the 2022 Lascaux Prize; another poem, “Father to Son,” won the 2023 New Millennium Award. In 2021, her poem “From the Room of an Unknown Girl” was awarded the Leslie McGrath Prize. Jennes’ first collection of poems, Blinded Birds (Finishing Line Press), received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. Another chapbook, FLOWN—an elegy for her late sister—will be published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. She lives in Ridgefield with husband Chuck.