The Sensualist: An Illustrated Novel [Paperback]

Barbara Hodgson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2001

Now in paperback, this potent mystery draws readers into a tangle of lost loves, vengeance, and murder. Set in the dark world of a European winter, and illuminated with Barbara Hodgson's haunting illustrations, The Sensualist is a visual and literary exploration of the limitations of looking and the boundless power of seeing.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Helen Martin, an art historian who's particularly taken with medical illustrations, has left the New World in search of her mysteriously absent husband, Martin Evans. The two have been apart many times before (he's a journalist after all), but this time no one, not even his mother, knows where he has gone. The novel begins with the feverish Helen snaking by train across Europe on the way to Martin's last known location, Vienna. Along the way, she becomes entangled in a plot involving a murder in an anatomical art museum.

This sounds, at first glance, like the premise of a run-of-the-mill missing-persons detective story. But Barbara Hodgson embellishes this simple tale with a baroque narrative style that suggests a symbolic order to Helen's anxious search. The mystery entwines with Helen's metaphysical and emotional quest for solace after the death of her relationship. Helen becomes obsessed with bodies--her own and those of her fellow travelers: "Helen woke up wearing someone else's eyes. Eyes that shattered her orbs into a thousand piercing splinters, that shook her balance off its pivot and flung her headlong into a mercurial fog." In several similar waking scenes, Helen imagines her breasts swelling and shrinking or her body parts mingling with others' as they look on. Throughout the book, she sees and feels and tastes and touches with fine-grained detail, and her bizarre body consciousness moves so easily from a dreamlike fantasy back into the prose of the mystery narrative that a dogmatic reader is apt to become frustrated if he or she demands a dogged pursuit of clues and solutions. But straightforward mystery is not Hodgson's method. The intersubjectivity of her characters is drawn in a poetic language that, like the exquisite and macabre color illustrations interlaced with the text, are meant to estrange sensory experiences and evoke consciousness of embodied existence. Hodgson's first book, The Tattooed Map (1995), was a similarly rich book of illustrations and intelligent prose, but The Sensualist is a more robust novel, a sophisticated artistic achievement that represents a significant literary talent. --Patrick O'Kelley --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

'The Sensualist' is handsomely packaged in antiques anatomical drawings, cut-outs and fold-aways. These are both dcor and clues, as the heroine tracks down some missing woodblocks from the 16th century and, co-incidentally, her own missing husband. Helen Martin, the heroine, is an updated Alice in Wonderland almost as odd as Lewis Carroll's. She meets peculiar characters on trains-outrageous old women, a talking dog, a suicidal passport inspector...Not only can the author package a books, she writes with a wicked sense of humor. For one of the more eccentric books you can find on a shelf, this may be it. -- Sante Fe New Mexican

Riding on a train to Vienna in search of her runaway husband, a Canadian art historian named Helen Martin enters a twilight world of strange hallucinations, astounding coincidences and deadly conundrums. Awakening in the middle of the night, Helen finds herself sharing a compartment with an old woman named Rosa Kovslovsky, who is somehow linked to her-so closely linked that Anna starts to believe her own body parts are being replaced by Rosa's. Then this odd companion hands her a small box full of wonders and clues, which will accompany Helen on a tour of Europe in search of much more than her missing spouse. The box contains a book on human anatomy, Jewels and notes. And, in a nice twist, the design of Barbara Hodgson's novel THE SENSUALIST incorporates all these visual aids. As readers follow Helen, we see the same images she is seeing: Illustrated plates from ancient anatomy texts, medicine vials, a pearl-studded picture frame. Like the historical works she researches, Helen's box-and Hodgson's book-provides a way of interweaving 'the significance of the words with the importance of the pictures.' Helen soon finds herself embroiled in a historical mystery as printing blocks from the works of the anatomist Vesalius seem to have resurfaced long after they were reportedly destroyed in World War II. Helen's husband was on their trail, and she quickly resumes his quest. 'The Sensualist' is a quirky and intense novel, full of weird events and oddball characters (a man who is interviewing every person in the Vienna telephone directory; a doctor who is inspired to become a train conductor when the conductor on his own train drops dead) built around an investigation of the senses. The best part is Hodgson's combination of pictures and text: as a physical object, 'The Sensualist' becomes an integral part of the plot, guiding the reader as the complex narrative unravels. -- The New York Times

The best part is Hodgson's combination of pictures and text: as a physical object, The Sensualist becomes an integral part of the plot, guiding the reader as the complex narrative unravels. -- The New York Times Book Review, Erik Burns --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811832082
• ISBN-13: 978-0811832083
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,762,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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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.