The Sick Child

The sick child is thought to be the artist’s sister. She is not a child but rather a young girl who is lying down or seated, with a blanket over her lower body and she faces a woman who is seated beside her, clutching the child’s left hand. We cannot see the woman’s face – it is turned down as she is bent over in apparent grief. While the painting’s title names the girl as the subject of the painting, it is the grieving woman and her attention to the girl that is particularly striking.

Death and the Child

Death and the Child depicts the anguish of a child who has been confronted with the corpse of her mother lying in bed. The child faces the viewer, hands pressing against her ears – she cannot bear to “hear”/ absorb what she has encountered; her face has an expression of fear and despair

Death in the Sickroom

In Death in the Sickroom several adults are scattered about, some standing, one woman sitting in the foreground; behind her another woman stands facing us. In the back of the room a figure sits on a chair, a blanket draped over her lap – presumably this is Munch’s sister. With his back to the wall an elderly man has both hands pressed to his chest. These individuals have come to help and mourn but they are isolated from each other, which adds to the grimness of the scene.

Image credits: wiki commons

Painting with Empathy: The Expressionist Art of Edvard Munch with Curator Øystein Ustvedt

Russell Teagarden 12.28.23 1863

Edvard Munch’s emotional portrayal of illness and suffering offers profound insights for health professionals and…

Agnes recognizes William’s unique potential and supports his choice to leave his family and head off to London to make his name in the theater world. Shakespeare rarely returns home to Stratford, and we only learn of his growing success indirectly. Agnes is forced to raise her children as a single parent and has to deal with her overwhelming grief when Hamnet dies. As she mourns the loss of her son, she is overcome with doubt about the fidelity of her absent husband, and her faith in their marriage is threatened. Ultimately, Agnes is given a playbill featuring the production of a new play written by her husband and she sets off on a trip to London to confront him on his own turf. She arrives uninvited at the Globe Theater in time to witness a performance of the play in which her husband has been able to channel his own grief at the loss of his son into one of the enduring literary works in the Western canon.  

I first became aware of this book in a New York Times article that appeared in the early stages of the COVID 19 pandemic shutdown. It was recommended as a worthwhile book to read in quarantine. I had never heard of Maggie O’Farrell but the two-sentence summary captured the book and author perfectly. I do not think O’Farrell is a prophetess, but she was nothing if not attuned to our times and circumstances. Assuming she was writing this novel well before coronavirus escaped the food market in Wuhan, the way she frames Hamnet’s death in the setting of the bubonic plague in Stratford is inspired. Her story captures the explosive fear that envelops the town as the plague spreads — you can feel the wind in your face as the townspeople slam the door shut in the face of anyone suspected or proven to be infected. The story is written in the present tense which heightens the sense of immediacy of events as they unfold for William and his parents, Agnes and her family, and the people living in Stratford. O’Farrell’s prose feels Elizabethan – in the description of glove making, removing honey from a beehive, preparing shrouds for the dead child. As I read, I found myself looking up many more words than usual; the language itself has the power to transport you back in time.  

But, while the choice of bubonic plague as the cause of death may have been fortuitous for book clubs and book sales in the world we lived in during the pandemic, I do not think it is the driving force in this book. The dominant theme is how we deal with grief from any cause. O’Farrell is not the first author to use the death of a child as a vehicle to explore the myriad consequences triggered by the loss of a loved one, especially for parents who lose a young son or daughter. The steady movement of the plot to the climactic scene in London makes Shakespeare’s response seem the more substantive. His literary genius has enabled him to channel his sadness at the loss of the son he adored into the creation of an authentic character into whom he could project all the hopes and dreams that he had for Hamnet.  

Interestingly, O’Farrell never names Shakespeare throughout the novel, referring to Shakespeare always as “he” or “him” I can only speculate what O’Farrell means to convey with this literary device. I think she is acknowledging that it is the truly rare individual who can accomplish what Shakespeare was able to do in redirecting his grief from personal sadness into a timeless literary masterpiece. We are thus like Agnes who must go through our day-to-day routine, try to find meaning in tragedy and the courage and strength to stay on our feet and continue to move forward. That is Agnes’ accomplishment — that she can summon the will to travel to London to confront William, and by her action have the goodness of heart to realize that her husband shares her loss. She is able to appreciate the gift he has been given to transform his personal grief into a meaningful expression that the world can share. With this newfound knowledge, her marriage will be reinvigorated, and their mutual love will be reinforced. Agnes is thus the named character who occupies center stage as the story unfolds.  

O’Farrell has written a truly beautiful book that brings to life the pain of loss and the capacity of men and women to endure. As we coped with the COVID-19 pandemic as individuals and communities, many were forced to deal with unexpected pain, suffering and death. Hamnet is a book for our time. Physicians and all other health professionals do their best to support families and communities as they deal with untimely loss of loved ones. I only hope that it will not set the bar too high on expectations of how to transform grief into meaning. We are not all going to be Shakespeares but we can hope to be Agneses, who can still find joy and meaning in our lived lives in the aftermath of devastating loss.   

Hamnet
Maggie O’Farrell 
Alfred Knopf, 2020: 384 pages 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database 
Web image by Medhum.org

For more than twenty years, Dr. K worked in a hot town in the Middle East yet never got to know or understand its people. His only friend was a troubled hospital anesthetist, Biju. Dr. K was employed by the local hospital and assigned to the Accident and Emergency department. The hospital administrator, Sir Farhad (a man Dr. K feared and revered) was an enigmatic figure of authority. Dr. K was obsessed with accumulating wealth. When Farhad offered him an opportunity to earn extra money, Dr. K had no qualms accepting the new part-time position: punishment-surgeon. He would supervise criminal sentences requiring physical mutilation that were imposed by a judge. 

Biju sarcastically told his friend, “You are at the cutting edge of your profession, Dr. K” (111). Yet there was no humor or humanity at presiding over the amputation of the hands of a father-son team of thieves or a maid convicted of stealing jewelry who underwent a similar clinical maiming. The hospital routinely accepted these “punishment cases” referred from the Corrections department and constructed a special operating theatre on the top floor for these “special ops.” Over a decade, Dr. K figured his involvement in this injurious punishment amounted to at least twenty cases.  

Raucous Biju gets accused and convicted of stealing drugs from the hospital. His penalty was removal of a hand. Dr. K pleaded on behalf of Biju with the hospital administrator but to no avail. Dr. K was not convinced of Biju’s guilt and would not participate in the amputation of his friend’s hand. Dr. K resigned his post as punishment-surgeon and eventually settled in England with plenty of money for a comfortable albeit lonely life.  

This disturbing and at times dastardly story displays more than a slight hint of Franz Kafka’s influence including the brutal application of “justice” and a byzantine bureaucracy. Even the physician-narrator’s nickname, Dr. K, appears to be a nod to Kafka.  

The novel illustrates the personal and professional downward spiral that can occur when empathy and morality are subjugated to the pursuit of wealth and status. The story raises troubling questions about the participation of doctors in the legal system’s punishment of criminals.  

The reliability of the narrator is tenuous. He may be in denial or perhaps his memory has grown fragile and corrupted. Remorse seems mostly absent. The story warns of the preponderance of lies we tell – to oneself and to others. Dr. K will not be mistaken for a model doctor or a good man. He has participated in hideous acts of cruelty, been an absent father, and placed the acquisition of money as his main priority. The opening line of the novel is a blunt confession and a succinct conclusion: “I did it for money” (3).

Tell Her Everything
Mirza Waheed
Melville House, Brooklyn, NY, 2022: 234 pages 
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. 
Web image by Medhum.org

Book Launch at the Lahore Literary Festival: 

The story begins abruptly. A woman named June is driving westward alone in her car, destination unknown. She is trying desperately to escape the small town near Litchfield, Connecticut where she grew up, after the funerals for four people who have died in a lethal housefire — her ex-husband Adam, her boyfriend Luke, her daughter Lolly, and her daughter’s fiancé Will. The tragedy is compounded by the timing of the fire, the night before the scheduled wedding of June’s daughter.  

In a format that is increasingly common in current literature, the story unfolds from the unique perspective of people connected in various ways to those who perished and those who survived the disaster. The gallery of characters includes June, Lolly, Luke’s mother Lydia, the lesbian couple who own the seaside hotel where June hides out, the Native American woman who cleans the rooms in the hotel, Will’s parents, and a fidgety, socially awkward adolescent who has an unhealthy fixation on Lydia. Each chapter is told from the vantage point of one person, in their voice, in their thoughts. The narrative is in the first person except for the chapters that recount June and Lydia’s experience. There is minimal dialogue, mostly stream of consciousness story telling. Insight emerges from the action. The chapters weave together seamlessly, and you feel yourself drawn more and more into this microcosm of people struggling to make sense of a senseless tragedy. It would be a category error to call the novel a page turner. But there is a profound mystery at the core of the story, an appreciation of the ineffable wonder at how our lives play out and the complexity of our interactions with one another. 

This haunting book incorporates many classic themes that characterize literature that can engage us – the pain of the sudden loss of loved ones, loneliness, regret for mistakes made and actions not taken. It  echoes Tolstoy’s notion that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Were it even simply a tale of coping with heartbreak and learning from life’s catastrophes, this would be a notable book. But there is an unexpected element that emerges from the prose that raises this novel to another level and makes it truly worth reading. 

Amid the grief and wreckage of personal stories, June and Lydia’s stories gradually move to the narrative center. Each one is wracked with guilt and remorse for ill-thought-out actions that caused a loved one profound emotional pain and hurt. Faced with death of the loved one, they feel powerless to get past  their feelings of worthlessness and shame. But as the story gradually unfolds and moves inexorably to its conclusion, each woman becomes more acutely aware of what she has done and is willing to accept responsibility. This self-knowledge culminates in a moment of genuine forgiveness and a sense of rebirth, 

In the Jewish tradition, forgiveness for sins must be preceded by a verbal recognition of wrongdoing, regret for what has been done, and a public resolve to avoid doing the same thing again if the opportunity to sin presents itself in the future. But there is a wrinkle depending on the nature of the sin. If it is directed to God, confession and repentance are enough to wipe the slate clean. But for sins committed against people, confession and repentance alone are insufficient. True forgiveness and closure are not achieved until forgiveness is granted by the person who was injured. Did You Ever Have a Family? describes and captures this interpersonal healing process in lyrical prose. Moreover, the sense of rebirth that animates the climax of the novel recapitulates the Jewish notion that a person who achieves genuine repentance after committing a sin is a new person, completely different than the person who committed the crime.  

There have been recent books like A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet that create a storyline that incorporates biblical elements. Did you ever have a family?’ is different. The architecture of the novel and its human voices are unequivocally modern. But the deeper structure has a profoundly religious sensibility; it grapples with spiritual themes and ideas normally taken up in non-secular settings. The book is infused with a heartfelt intensity that is unusual in contemporary fiction. I’m sure the author would be gratified to know that his book has beautifully articulated the regenerative power of forgiveness in a manner that transcends the bounds of plain fiction.  

Did You Ever Have a Family? 
Bill Clegg 
Reviewed by Howard Trachtman 
Simon & Schuster, Inc 
Published 2015 
Paperback version, Scout Press, 2016, pp291 
Web Photo by Norbert Buduczki

Kirilov is the district doctor. His six-year-old son has just this moment died of diphtheria. He stands watching his wife caress the body as the doorbell rings. It is a wealthy stranger (Abogin) who begs the Doctor to come treat his wife who is in great pain. Kirilov says that he cannot possibly leave his wife at this time. Abogin insists, however, claiming that the doctor must know how terrible it is to witness the illness of a loved one and that his home is close-by. Kirilov relents.

But when they arrive at Abogin’s house, his wife is not home. She has pretended to be ill so that her husband would leave the house allowing her to run away with her lover. Abogin is crushed and begins to complain to Kirilov. Kirilov is fiercely angry that he has been dragged from his son’s death-bed to hear Abogin’s love troubles. They scream at one another, and the doctor returns home, with a firm and undying conviction that all those with money deserve his hatred.

Chekhov suggests that grief and misery do not bring people together to share, but force them apart. Pain is egotistic. The story also reflects on the status of doctors. When Abogin tries to lure the Doctor from his house, he speaks of the noble, self-sacrificing profession of medicine. However, he has so little respect for Kirilov as to hound him, then offer him money to absolve the insult. Kirilov, meanwhile, unjustly forms a prejudice against the rich that will never leave him.

Original Source: The Tales of Chekhov, Vol. 11: The Schoolmaster and Other Stories
Publisher: Ecco, 1986 | First published in 1887
Alternate Source: Chekhov’s Doctors, edited by Jack Coulehan
Publisher: Kent State University Press, 2003
Translated by: Constance Garnett
Places Published: New York; Kent, Ohio & London

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

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