Book Post: Jaouad, Sacks, Ernaux, Aaronovitch
Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad, 345pp
I read an article that recommended this book so I took it up, not knowing anything about the author or her popular column in the New York Times. All I knew this was a story of a young person in their early 20s who gets diagnosed with cancer and then deals with that and subsequent recovery.
Suleika graduates college, meets a boy, moves to Paris for a job, gets into the relationship with the new guy and when things are looking up get diagnosed with leukemia. This book is split in half - her illness and treatment in all the gory details of what that entails and how it affects her body and her mind and her relationship. She started writing her New York Times column at this time as well. She describes her stem cell transplant and what that entails as well. And the friends she meets who are also young people with cancer and what happens to them. And the second part is her recovery and the trip around the US to meet people who have written to her while she was sick and as a way to find who she was after the illness.
This is a very honest book, and not always an easy book but also a hopeful one. And for some reason, reading about people who deal with long term illness has been fascinating to me lately, maybe because I'm getting older and there is more awareness of the fragility of the body.
Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks, 207pp
When Sacks was about my age, he went on a hike in Norway, and while escaping from a bull on his path, he fell and shattered his left leg. It took him seven hours to crawl down to where he was found by other people and could be rescued - if night had set in he would have died and he found other people just as night was settling - very dramatic movie type rescue that actually happened to him. He got surgery on his leg in London but in the process he lost the feeling that the leg belonged to him. It felt alien. At the time, there wasn't much in medical literature describing these sensations or how to restore the movement, so Sacks wrote up his own case history. His hike, his crawl down, his surgery time, his recovery time and restoring sensation. This book is about how we perceive ourselves and what happens if we lose the knowledge, the proprioception sense of any of our parts. And how to regain it. As usual, Sacks has a way with words. He does get a bit too philosophical at the end of the book, which he himself acknowledges in the Afterward was too much. But other than that bit, this was an enjoyable case study as usual with Sacks.
I was reading this book at the same time as the Jaouad book, so I was reading two different narratives of illness and psychological impacts of illness and recovery, which felt complimentary at times. One less dire although at some point Sacks' life was on the line. It is interesting to see two different people grappling with what happened to them, where they had no control.
The Years by Annie Ernaux, c. 240pp
When I was watching a brief interview with Erneax after she just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, an interviewer asked her what book out of all she'd written represents her the best and what she wants to readers to read. Ernaux pointed to this book as the one that shows the most her approach and what she wants to accomplish. I read her "Woman's Story" last year, which was about her mother. This book is about her own life but told from someone who is observing the memories as the indications of history and times she lives in. You can't separate memories and who the person is from the context of their life and the history and events in the time and place where they live. So it is a sort of autobiography but with more what that life says about the world and about the person and how they both influence each other. So there are some very intimate thoughts at the same time as there is a bit of a remove from the whole person, maybe because this was not in the first person. And you are never quite sure how much is a real recollection and what is fiction at times. But certainly, a glimpse of what it was like to grow up in France after the war and to live up to almost present day. When outside politics influence memory and how memories are formed and how we change. I don't know if I liked this book - I though "Woman's Story" was a little more effective, but this book really does make you think of what makes a person and a life. I do see why she is a popular French writer. The book feels very French.
What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch, 154pp [Rivers of London novella].
Rivers of London novella that takes place while Peter was in the country, trying to find the missing girls. This novella is from Abigail's point of view with a small appearance from Nightingale. It was cute enough. It was interesting to see Abigail's world and what interests her, and her family situation with the tragedy that befallen her brother. She doesn't always make the smartest decisions, but she is a teenager and of course she feels she can solve it herself. But like tell an actual magician is a good rule to actually follow! At least she does make a plan before going into the haunted house. I wasn't too invested in the story though; it was ok. I feel this novella was two different stories - one up to the part in the house and the other in the house itself and the memories, and it was tonally just different. And there were talking foxes, which is still very weird - I find the River goddesses less weird than talking foxes for some reason. Overall an interesting side trip into this universe but just ok as a book.