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The Book About Blanche and Marie: A Novel

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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.

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.