From: Remi
Category: Books
Date: 21 August 2004
This book was mentioned on a reading list I was given when I went to the Brighton and Sussex medical school open day last year. The book consists of several shorts stories based on the writer's experiences as a just graduated doctor serving a rural community in the Russian countryside over 1916-1917. He writes in short sentences, to place in you the atmosphere of his suroundings without too much description. You are always conscious that he's writing with hindsight, but that doesn't decrease the tension and surprise he creates within the drama of the stories. The opening one details a young girl whose legs are sverely damaged in an industrial accident. She's the only child of a widower, he can't live without her. Against terrifying odds of pre-modern medicine, the narrator stems her blood loss, amputates and sews up the proceedings. I was visibly moved, and so will you be if you amble along to Waltham Forest library across the road from Walthamstow Central library and get this book out. It's in the hardback section, even though it's a paperback, perhaps because it contains such stirring stuff. The next story is a success story, and again. I was asking myself why the author abandoned his medical career. It's not all a winning game, though. Fortunately the author doesn't dwell on the disasters, as much to protect his image as to tend to our tender emotions, perchance. There are moments of humour and light-heartedness, imbued with a sense of absurdity when presented with such misery. How else must one approach it without slipping into earnestness, or even worse, sentimentality, the bane of all serious artists. Suck it and see!
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