The Sensualist [Paperback]

Barbara Hodgson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; First Printing, Loose Binding edition (1998)
• ASIN: B002UQ4BBQ
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Anatomy Lesson, August 8, 2002

By 

Katie (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sensualist: An Illustrated Novel (Paperback)

The Sensualist is a very beautiful book. The illustrations are both exacting and balanced but the textual representations of the body try to mimic the pictorial and this is where the book begins to falter. The plot is rather haphazard but I didn't mind this - after all, it's a mystery.

Helen Martin is searching for her husband but instead finds anatomical drawings. The focus of the novel immediately switches from the huband to the drawings, relating their history and perhaps more about the history of all anatomical illustration than the readre would care to learn. When the lesson gives way to narrative once again the writing becomes centered on the physical and tactile sensations of Helen Martin. This would be a fantastic cinematic effect but somehow just doesn't work in the novel...

By the middle of the book I was reading quickly, not even looking at the drawings, just wanting to reach the resolution of the mystery and learn the outcome of Helen's search for her husband. In the end I was pretty disappointed.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strangely involving, unnecesarily weird, July 11, 2001

By 

Emilia Palaveeva "ema-in-seattle" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sensualist: An Illustrated Novel (Paperback)

After the first 50 pages, the books suddenly draws you in. Helen is in search of her husband, so she can put an end to a dead marriage. Following his steps, she becomes teh center of a strange mystery, sought after by weird characters whose interst in her is never quite explained.

The novel is a page-turner. The descriptions of European cities is detailed and alive. However, a lot of circumstances remain unclear. The reader is left with a lot of whys and how comes. Yet, that said, the novel is so unique that is worth the read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Helen through the Looking Glass, September 25, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sensualist (Hardcover)

Helen Martin, an anatomical artist, goes to Europe to search for her missing estranged husband. Along the way she gets sidetracked by some odd and perhaps supernatural characters who have their own plans for her. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, this is light, whimsical fiction; however, if whimsy is not your thing, you may feel like you're trapped in a bad episode of "Twin Peaks." I personally enjoyed it quite a bit. The ending of this story is more conclusive than Hodgson's last book, The Tattooed Map. Warning to fans of Toy and Movable Books: Although The Sensualist does have several illustrations and fold-outs (I liked the fold-out brain on page 122) this is more of a full-sized novel (295 pages) than the slim The Tattooed Map.