Book About Blanche and Marie: A Novel

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Hailed internationally for his unique ability to shape historical facts into tales of extraordinary depth and probing insight, Per Olov Enquist has long been regarded as one of the world's foremost authors of literary fiction. In The Book about Blanche and Marie, Enquist has once again found inspiration from the historical record, this time exploring the complex relationship between two of the twentieth century's most remarkable women: Blanche Wittman, the famous hysteria patient of Professor J.M. Charcot at ...
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More About This Book

Overview

Hailed internationally for his unique ability to shape historical facts into tales of extraordinary depth and probing insight, Per Olov Enquist has long been regarded as one of the world's foremost authors of literary fiction. In The Book about Blanche and Marie, Enquist has once again found inspiration from the historical record, this time exploring the complex relationship between two of the twentieth century's most remarkable women: Blanche Wittman, the famous hysteria patient of Professor J.M. Charcot at Salpetriere Hospital outside Paris, and Marie Curie, the Polish physicist and Nobel Prize winner. While the scientist tries to understand the nature of radiation, Blanche, her assistant and, at the time of her death, a triple amputee as a result of exposure to radiation, fills three notebooks with her exploration of deceptively simple question: What is love? With rights sold in ten countries, The Book about Blanche and Marie is at once a haunting look at scientific martyrdom and an intimate and moving portrait of a friendship between two uniquely brave and talented women.
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Editorial Reviews

Ruth Franklin
The Book About Blanche and Marie offers a sort of feminist revisionism, restoring the forgotten figure of Blanche to her rightful place and insisting that Marie's passion is as valid as her work. But I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for Marie as her affair of the heart took on ridiculous proportions, with her contribution to science diminished to "that deadly blue light."
— The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Swedish novelist Enquist (The Royal Physician's Visit) finds various riveting facets in the working friendship between Marie Curie and her lab assistant, Blanche Wittman. Fixating on "the utterly perfect bodies of these two women," Enquist zeroes in on what befell Blanche's, and on what it has to say about being modern. After working with the uranium-rich ore called pitchblende, Blanche got radiation poisoning; she eventually had both legs and one left arm amputated. She moved around on a wagon and lived in Marie's Paris apartment, where she died in 1913. (Curie died in 1938 of radiation sickness.) Blanche kept several notebooks, collectively entitled The Book of Questions, in which she revealed her obsession with love, first stoked years before by the doctor who treated her for hysteria at age 18, J.M. Charcot-the renowned head of Salpetriere Hospital (Paris's asylum for mad women) whose public experiments were duly absorbed by the young Sigmund Freud. As Enquist fancifully, lugubriously and rapturously riffs on, extends, and wonders after the notebooks (which really exist), Blanche, Marie (suffering the scandal of her adulterous relationship with Paul Langevin) and the conflicted Charcot get alternating POV chapters, and the modern sensibility that sprang from her body-scientifically scrutinized and dissected, but ever resistant to being known or possessed-emerges beautifully. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The ordeals and sacrifices of two remarkable women are analyzed with penetrating intensity in the Swedish master's latest. Following the method employed throughout his oeuvre, and with particular success in his recent fictions The Royal Physician's Visit (2001) and Lewi's Journey (2005), Enquist connects his own history and sensibility to the stories of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Marie Curie and her ill-fated research assistant (and eventual soulmate), Blanche Wittman. Those stories are told in three "Books" composed by Blanche after her lethal exposure to radiation, both during Mme. Curie's experiments and in earlier years when she was a patient treated for "hysteria" by eminent neurologist J.M. Charcot, and also his assistant, then his adulterous lover. Moving backward and forward in time, Enquist presents Blanche's ruminations on her treatment at Saltpetriere Hospital (a filthy, overcrowded "black castle in the middle of Paris"), where she became a de facto emblem of the "madness" of love; Polish-born Marie Curie's self-destructive affair with a married scientist, which evoked outraged anti-Semitic protests and drove her from France; and the sad final years of both women, when Marie became a disgraced outsider in the land where she had earned unprecedented honors, and Blanche a (still sentient, forever impassioned) torso "living" in a wooden cart. In a masterly display of concision, Enquist packs an imposing enormity of historical and scientific information into a searching exploration of the phenomenon of love; a complex meditation on the riddles that challenge his characters' ingenuity-how do we manage to love, given the fragility and impermanence of the body, and how can humanemotion and experience be measured and quantified, much less comprehended?The result is a reading experience that carries the impact of an Ingmar Bergman film based on a novel by Thomas Mann. It's astonishing, and it's unforgettable.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781585676682
  • Publisher: Overlook Press, The
  • Publication date: 3/23/2006
  • Pages: 240
  • Product dimensions: 5.70 (w) x 8.30 (h) x 0.92 (d)

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Sort by: Showing 1 Customer Review

  • Posted February 24, 2011

    interesting and informative

    Very good! Never knew much about Marie Curie--really enjoyed it! Good information for a report also.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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