The Book About Blanche and Marie: A Novel [Hardcover]

Per Olov Enquist (Author), Tiina Nunnally (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 23, 2006

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 fascinatingly complex relationship between two of the twentieth century’s most remarkable women: Blanche Wittman, the famous hysteria patient of Professor J.M. Charcot at Salpêtriére 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 a deceptively simple question: What is love? 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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From 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 Salpêtrière 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.)
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From Booklist

Blanche is Blanche Wittman (1859--1913), the most famous patient of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, a crucial mentor to Freud; Marie is Marie Curie (1867-1934), the first person awarded two Nobel Prizes. In the 1890s, Blanche became the Curies' assistant, handling the pitchblende from which Marie eventually isolated radium. Radiation poisoning led to amputations of both of Blanche's legs and her left arm well before her early death. To the end, she was, especially in Enquist's curious novel, whose narrative he often interrupts with personal memories and reflections, Marie's confidante, especially after Pierre Curie's 1906 death and during Marie's illicit affair with married fellow physicist Paul Langevin, which, when revealed, became a scandal with racist overtones (Marie was Polish and accused of being Jewish) that clouded the awarding of her second Nobel. Marie bonded with Blanche because Blanche, too, knew passionate love--perhaps too passionate, the exclamation marks Enquist liberally inserts to suggest various kinds of heavy breathing imply, to quite escape also being ludicrous. The tone of this admittedly absorbing book is piquantly ambivalent. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 218 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Press; 1st edition (March 23, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585676683
• ISBN-13: 978-1585676682
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,287,495 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars (3.5) "Radium, death, art and love.", April 21, 2006

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Book About Blanche and Marie: A Novel (Hardcover)

In Enquist's distillation of the notebooks of Blanche Wittman, two women are adrift on the sea of the Enlightenment: Blanche, the "hysterical" darling of the scientific community and Marie Curie, the Polish physicist and eventual Nobel Prize winner. Wittman's "The Book of Questions", consists of three journals, the yellow, the black and the red, in which she questions the nature of love as it relates to the physical world. Wittman, the famous patient of Professor JM Charcot at Saltpetriere Hospital in the last decade of the nineteenth century, enjoys the attentions of the medical community as they seek to discover the true nature of that curious creature, Woman. Later Wittman spends hours assisting Marie Curie with her research, both of them handling the amazing new curative element, radiation, that will cost Blanch all of her limbs but one and finally her life. Radiation is, for a time, considered a miracle, to the detriment of those who eventually perish from leukemia and other such disorders. Radioactive health spas enjoy inordinate popularity; there is even "Curie Hair Water" for the prevention of hair loss, but by 1925 the tide has begun to turn.

Picture Blanche at the end, ensconced in her wooden box, reduced to a torso with only a right arm and hand to pen her thoughts, forever ruminating on the nature of woman and love, radiation the fusion of all, the instrument of her death. Visualize the two unusual women, the men in their lives adding complications and unhappiness, relationships distorted by ill-fated choices, romance the fuel of each pursuit. Searching for cache in a man's world, Blanche is an item of interest, the subject of hysterical experiments at the hands of her physician, Charcot, who becomes her lover, Curie the inquisitive scientist who will be there until the end. Think of Blanche and Marie, heads bent over their scientific experiments, the poisonous element that spells the demise of Blanche's extraordinary beauty and deforms Curie's right hand, the two basking in an island of friendship and mutual admiration while hovering over luminescent death.

Often-confusing in point of view, the novel rings of documentation rather than fiction, yet retains its lyrical beauty throughout, Blanche's impulsive ramblings marking her as yet another victim of the Enlightenment. The true irony is that the scientific community is so easily enchanted by radical scientific explanations without data, an impulsive merging of hubris and information, the birth of theories that will later prove not only to be erroneous, but deadly. Unfortunately the text never quite escapes the ambiance of a disjointed memoir, rambling and inconsistent, a time warp of Blanche's fevered observations, which may or may not include her complicity in Charcot's death and her obsession with imagination at the cost of reason. Familiar names appear: Jane Avril, Mesmer, Sigmund Freud, a culture on the brink of scientific discovery, spiritualism and the shimmering radiation that so enthralls, the plot as ephemeral as the elements. This novel is unique, disturbing and a timely reminder of man's penchant for folly. Luan Gaines/ 2006.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars sad and beautiful, like love, December 10, 2006

By 

Emma Rose Freeman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Book About Blanche and Marie: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book helped me understand love and human nature. The repetitive style of the prose mirrored the nature of repetetive, obsessive thoughts such as those centered on love or scientific pursuits. Ultimately it left me feeling unsatisfied and still yearning to understand, which I think is the whole point. A beautiful novel.