Kairos is the claustrophobic story of an affair between a 19-year-old woman and a married man more than 30 years her senior. Nothing unique in that situation. But this clandestine relationship unfolds against the backdrop of the last years of the German Democratic Republic before the sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall. This too is familiar territory — from novels like John LeCarre’s The Spy who Came in from the Cold and Ian McEwen’s The Innocent to popular movies like The Lives of Others. What makes Kairos different from anything that I have read about this period is the microscopic view it provides of the dysfunctional relationship between Katharina and Hans and the larger vision of reality that emerges. 

Their initial meeting is a completely chance encounter on a bus in Berlin as they shove to board it and escape the rain. They spy each other immediately and within a few pages are sleeping together. Hans is a married broadcast journalist who seems to have found a secure niche for himself despite state control of the press, while Katharine is a student in theater arts. Literary May-December romances are not uncommon, but the rushed and secretive meetings between the two lovers quickly move into less comfortable terrain. Katharine becomes increasingly insecure and less assertive in her interactions with Hans. Violent sadomasochistic behavior intrudes into their space, and Hans becomes more domineering and demanding. This is not a fuzzy tale of two star-crossed lovers who pine longingly for one another; this is obsessive territory. Over time, distrust and suspicion and mutual cruelty invade the lovers’ trysts. When Katharine leaves Berlin for a period of academic study in Frankfurt, it triggers exaggerated accusations of betrayal by Hans. He blames Katharine for being unreliable and not fully committed to their relationship and calls into question her loyalty to him. There is lots of sex and coded signals and furtive meetings to avoid detection by Hans’ wife and son. But the mood becomes chillier and more tense with each turning page. Eventually, the political uprising across Germany and Eastern Europe ruptures the novel’s narrow field of vision and alters the contour of their illicit relationship.  

The novel is bracketed by two efforts at historical reconstruction, accomplished by mining written records from the period. This highlights the power of literary narratives to frame our lives, something that Kairos accomplishes so successfully. The plot is spare but Jenny Erpenbeck has created a novel that is very thick with the lives of the two characters, and it is that richness of texture and intimacy, disturbing as it might be, which causes the book to reverberate in your memory long after you put it down. 

Why is that? What Kairos accomplishes better than other books I have read in recent memory is its ability to bring to life the impact of our social and political environment on our inner lives. The tautness of Erpenbeck’s writing, the novel’s ominous and suspicious atmosphere, are a direct reflection of what it might have been like to live in East Germany after the Iron Curtain descended and the Berlin Wall was erected. The East German domestic spy service, the notorious Stasi, infiltrated everyday life. Anyone could be an informer and everyone could be informed on. Petty offenses against the Communist party, minor disagreements between colleagues about policy, and trivial comments among friends about current affairs could quickly escalate into charges of treason, of being an enemy of the state. No one knew exactly what could provoke a summons to a closed room interrogation and a prison sentence. 

 It is in this stultifying environment that Katharine and Hans’s relationship takes shape and it is against this sweeping historical background that we confront and must try to understand their thoughts and actions. Katharine is young but seems deadened by life on the dreary East German side of the Berlin Wall with its brutalist architecture and its color spectrum ranging from shades of gray to shades of gray. For her, even a destructive relationship with an older man, a spiteful and hurtful one at that, may have provided a glimmer of hope for a “real” life. Hans has survived under the Communist regime and achieved a modicum of fame and fortune. But we can only speculate on the cost. Erpenbeck makes it clear that the price was high. The humanity of both main characters has been stunted by their reaction to living in a police state and by internalizing the distrustful depersonalizing actions of the government’s internal espionage apparatus. I suggest that Erpenbeck’s accomplishment is to show how the political environment can influence personal patterns of behavior. 

How would we have held up if forced to live under such conditions? Would one have had the courage to speak truth to power or would one have hunkered down, kept a low profile, and avoided confrontation with the state? What would we have resorted to in order to protect ourselves and our job, family, and friends? Could we have maintained our humanity and dignity? Katharine and Hans lived with these unbearable dilemmas every day and their personalities were gradually warped under the relentless pressure.  

It is easy to devalue the lives of others living in the former East Germany or Soviet Union, or current China or Iran, where men and women are forced to remain in countries that interfere with the freedom to think and express oneself and where every thought and action is under surveillance. But it would be a mistake. We should not lose sight of external factors in this country that threaten our individuality and our humanity. Whether it is political uniformity and social tribalism or blind use of the tools of artificial intelligence, we too must recognize and address the social forces that could impact on how we interact with the world and behave to one another. Like the Stasi in East Germany, these forces have the real potential to diminish our stature as moral agents.  

Neither main character in Kairos is easy to identify with and it is hard to muster sympathy for the plight of either one. But our distaste for Katharine and Hans is tempered by the knowledge that their souls have been distorted, damaged almost beyond repair, by a state that has flattened the complexity of human individuality into a file of incriminating notes based on informer reports. I suspect it may be especially hard for a woman to read this book and suffer along with Katharine as she is manipulated and physically and psychologically abused by Hans. But one cannot escape the reality that Hans too is a victim. Quality literature like Kairos does not aim to rationalize human behavior. What it can do is contextualize fictional characters and in doing so make us understand what some of our fellow human beings are going through a little bit better and with a little more sensitivity. 

Winner: International Booker Prize 2024

A Q&A with Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann

KAIROS 
Author: Jenny Erpenbeck 
Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions; First Paperback Edition (May 14, 2024) 
Hardback: 2021, Penguin Verlag 
Paperback: 304 pages 
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0811238539 

Photo by Lucy Bruell

These changes have not all been for the better. Perhaps you have noticed such unsettling changes yourself. A child in a restaurant is glued to a tablet screen, probably the last resort of a weary parent trying to enjoy their first peaceful meal in days. A group of tourists in Paris marvels at the Eiffel Tower, not as it is, but as it appears through their phone camera and on their phone screen. Neighborhoods have become quieter and less lively, as children have retreated from the streets and hunkered down at home with their phones. 

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, elaborates upon these ideas in his book The Anxious Generation. In this book, he describes the dual trends of increasing smartphone/screen-based engagement, driven by perverse economic incentives of technology companies, and decreasing real-world, human-to-human play, driven by over-protection from modern parents. The collision of these forces has defined Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, as the most anxious and depressed generation of our time. 

In the book, Haidt notes that the tactics of technology companies to drive increased user engagement have been well documented by activists such as Tristan Harris. Much like tobacco companies in the mid to late 20^th century, modern technology companies prey on young users (e.g. children) as a source of future/recurring revenue, and fight off consumer protections through aggressive lobbying campaigns at the government level. As a result, children are spending record numbers of hours on smartphones, increasingly isolated from the real world and irritable when deprived of their digital drugs. Haidt also observes that the technology problems of girls and boys are unique. For example, girls are significantly more prone to social media addiction and the associated psychological disturbances such as distorted body image and self-worth. On the other hand, boys are much more avid users of video games and pornography, which reduce their desire for real-world play and romantic relationships. 

Haidt also notes that over a longer but overlapping time period, children have been overly protected from real-world responsibilities and real-world play. He attributes these new attitudes to the changing media landscape and how crimes are portrayed in the news, as well as legal challenges which have incentivized parental overprotection. In one example, he describes a pitiful incident in which an eight-year-old child was seen walking the streets alone, and a concerned passerby called the police to report an “abandoned child.” In this case and many others, parents have been held responsible for this absurd new “crime”, a sight which would have been entirely commonplace 30 years ago. Haidt highlights the irony of how the real-world, full of rich experiences, appropriate risk-taking, and character-building responsibilities has been overly regulated by our society, whereas the digital world, rife with dangers for growing adolescent minds, has been almost entirely unchecked, unregulated, and ignored.  

Bringing people out of the digital world and into the real world is a formidable task. One strategy that Haidt found success with was to encourage people to reconnect with a sense of awe in the world. Awe is a vague concept, but can be defined as a feeling of wonder inspired by the sacred or sublime. The real world is full of such awe-inspiring moments, if only we could stop to notice them. In a comically simple exercise, Haidt encouraged students in his university course to take a walk through Manhattan without their phones or headphones, and then to write about their experience on this “awe walk.” The written reflections were so beautiful that he included excerpts of his students’ work in the book to illustrate how such simple measures could have such a profound impact. One such excerpt is reproduced below: 

For children who have no choice but to grow up in the digital era, Haidt attempts to boil his recommendations down into four rules for a healthier childhood:  

1. No smartphones until high school. 

2. No social media before the age of 16. 

3. No phones in schools. 

4. More independence, play, and responsibility in the real world. 

He recognizes that while these solutions are simple, their implementation is anything but. As a society, we face a daunting collective action problem as it pertains to technology and real-world experiences. Such problems require collective solutions, and Haidt encourages parents to get together, organize, and raise their children together in a real-world oriented manner. While broader changes in school policy may seem out of reach, Haidt encourages struggling schools to get inspired by the numerous case studies of schools that went phone-free and experienced positive changes by almost every metric, within a matter of two to three years. 

Some may say that our society is too far gone to reverse these negative changes, but this is certainly not the case. In fact, people are more skeptical now than ever of the negative role of technology in our lives, and collective action on this problem may be easier now than it ever has been before. As we sit perched on the precipice of a new technological revolution in artificial intelligence, this sentiment has already garnered potent opposition to unchecked technological advance and implementation. Will we learn from our past mistakes? Unfortunately, our track record is not encouraging. Only time will tell how far we go before we decide we need a detox. 

The Anxious Generation 
Jonathan Haidt 
Penguin Press, New York City, March 26, 2024, 400 pages
Web Photo by Joel Fulgencio 

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

That is just the start of it. 

The plot has numerous twists and turns. The perspective and writing style shift from character to character with each passing chapter.  There is movement backward and forward in time. The backdrop changes with the suddenness of the movement of scenery between acts in a play. The lives of the characters branch out in many directions, venturing into uncharted territory and intersecting unexpectedly at key moments. The prose and the imagery are textured to match each character. However, all the elements cohere, creating the experience of reading in a lived world. 

The trajectory of each parent evolves darkly over time. Dickie is blackballed because of an identity he has kept secret all his life. Imelda becomes increasingly desperate, and her actions become more and more unhinged. The two children can only turn to one another to fill the gap left by their wayward parents. As disaster draws closer and closer to Dickie, he partners with a  laconic neighbor to build an underground bunker in the woods to survive the coming Armageddon. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

This 643- page book is extraordinary.  When I started it on the strong recommendation of my dependable oldest daughter, I was unsure if I would have the patience to persevere to the end. But this is an all-encompassing novel. Paul Murray has created a world, hauls you into it, and hurtles you forward into the turbulent stream of the characters’ lives. The artistry is astonishing. The setting, the interior monologues, the conversations, the actions are aptly described. 

The story has an air of inevitability to it, which brings me to an aspect of this book that made it truly special: do things happen in the world at random or is everything linked in a deterministic web of causation? The classic expression of the determinist view is — if one single monarch butterfly flaps its black and orange wings in New York, then the subtle change in air flow in the Big Apple is passed along across the Atlantic, through Europe, across Asia in countless incremental steps and culminates in a monsoon in Bangladesh. The bee sting that furnishes the title for Murray’s novel is a seemingly innocuous event on the day of Imelda and Dickie’s wedding. But in the world of the book, it unleashes  a sequence of events for each member of the Barnes family that defines their destiny. It seems as if they are trapped in a dense web  and cannot escape the forces driving them forward to their ultimate doom. Yet, each character confronts moments of crisis, episodes of personal vulnerability and they make choices. They fail to answer the phone call, they opt to go to the party, they invite relatives to visit. Who or what is controlling their fate?

Philosophers have traditionally debated and continue to argue whether free will is a reflection of reality or whether it is a convenient delusion. We may never fully know or comprehend why things play out the way they do in each of our lives. It may always appear as if we are being moved around by relentless forces that are bigger than and invisible to each of us. At the same time, we feel that we have agency. That is the mystery of life. In a novel, there is an inscrutable controlling power, the author who is the puppeteer manipulating all the movements of his characters and the story. She can make events play out in whatever way she thinks best matches her vision of the paginated world. But good authors know that they must create human characters and not marionettes. They have to walk the philosophical tightrope between determinism and free will. Within a tightly constructed literary universe, authors must create a world in which the narrative captures the larger forces buffeting  the characters drawn on the page, be it climate change, immigration to a new county, or the outbreak of war. But there must be space for the characters to behave as recognizable people subject to the consequences of their own choices or those of others. When authors succeed, the readers of their books realize that have been offered a precious insight about what it means to be fully human. No one has done this better than Paul Murray in this monumental book.

THE BEE STING
Paul Murray
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux
New York, 2023 pp 643

Photo credit: Boris Smokrovic

Rearranged by Kathleen Watt is subtitled “An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Tranposed.”  At the outset of the book, the author feels on top of the world.  She can hardly believe she has the opportunity, as a member of the Metropolitan Opera Extra Chorus, to share the stage with some of her biggest idols.  She has a wonderful partner and a warm and close family. 

Then, one day, Watt discovers a bump in her mouth.  She is found to have a rare and aggressive oral cancer that is “breathtakingly tailored to obliterate my profession and my raison d’être, never mind my face” (p. 51).  She undergoes multiple reconstructive surgeries, some of which are unsuccessful or become infected.   While she is initially reassured she will be able to sing again in a few months, that goal proves unrealistic.  Watt’s partner is emotionally supportive for years, but even for her there is a limit.  When the author is unable to pull her own weight financially and develops an addiction to alcohol, the relationship unravels. 

The greater part of Rearranged chronicles Watt’s medical ordeals. Previously an active and productive person, she is now at the whim of her doctors’ schedules.  She gives up all hope of performing again. As anyone who has experienced an illness or the illness of a loved one knows, navigating the health care system can easily become a full-time job.   

The book ends optimistically as Watt’s condition stabilizes. She realizes she is lucky to be alive and accepts her “rearranged” looks.  She reconciles herself to a future where she will “henceforth sing mostly for myself “(p. 304), and redefines herself as a writer specializing in the performing arts. 

Rearranged is a book which teaches valuable lessons.  Watt endures extreme hardship, has her dreams shattered, and acquires wisdom that will benefit providers and patients.    

One lesson learned is that unempathic caregivers may compound a patient’s suffering.  “A multi-gigging freelancer with catastrophic coverage at best” (p. 31), the author has a miscommunication with an endodontist and is threatened with a lawsuit for presumed nonpayment.   And when she dares to question another doctor, he snaps at her: “Ha, ha!  I’m not going to teach you surgery” (p. 57).  Fortunately, other providers have a manner that is more conducive to healing: “Because he [the doctor] conveyed neither arrogance nor impatience, his confident command allowed me to trust him easily.  And at that moment, nothing mattered more to my successful outcome” (p. 55), and “Alone among my doctors, he had thought to lament my loss.  A helium cloud filled me at this simple expression of kindness.  Nothing at that moment could have been more restorative” (p.108).    

One can understand how traumatic it must be to have one’s facial features distorted as the result of illness.  For a singer it can be career-ending, not only because she needs to show her face to the public but because the vocal cavity may be damaged.  But, beyond this, because “the face is the single most important organ of human communication” (p.105), the author feels she has lost her identity: “I felt as bereft of myself as I was of my voice…I missed seeing my reflection in the faces of others.  I began to lose track of my own subtexts, and myself” (p.237)    

The author relates a vivid and frightening memory of experiencing post-operative delirium (sometimes called ICU psychosis). When she comes out of surgery and suddenly realizes she cannot talk because she has had a tracheotomy, she pounds on the wall.  She wishes she had had “healthy people to paste accurate information alongside my cockeyed perception, so I could avoid drawing mistaken conclusions from my misperceptions” (p.146).  Instead, she overhears attendants saying “Boy, she’s really out of it” (p. 149) and referring to her as “a royal bitch” (p.140).  At no time does anyone think to help “confirm her sanity, quell her fears” (p. 150).  Hopefully, health care professionals will read this and think about it the next time they see a patient right out of the OR.    

In closing, it bears mentioning that at one point Kathleen Watt consults with surgeon Iain Hutchison in London.  Hutchison is the initiator and sponsor of the Saving Faces Art Project, a series of paintings by artist Mark Gilbert which “portray the faces of patients before, after and in some cases actually during their surgery for injury, deformity or cancer” and whose purpose is to “communicate the strength of spirit which can enable people with facial disfigurements and trauma to lead full and happy lives.” (from https://savingfaces.co.uk/our-mission/art-project/ )  Likewise, the author of Rearranged inspires the reader by her strength of spirit in the face of inconceivable adversity. 

REARRANGED
An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer And Life Transposed
Heliotrope Books, New York, 2023   
384 pages 

Kathleen Watt’s website: kathleenwatt.com