Customer Reviews

The Sensualist: An Illustrated Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

A beautifully drawn and conceived start to this book eventually falls under the weight of its abstractions. Despite its nicely drawn set-up and the clever integration of illustration and text, there's no real solution to the mystery of Helen's isolation, nor a real point to the characters who are trying to rebuild her psyche. And the payoff's remarkably flat. Still there's no doubt Hodgson took a lot of care in the details of the characters, and at times she perfectly renders the revelation of Helen to her own senses. It's got a lot of the slow, exacting descriptiveness of A.S. Byatt's work, but without the lush characterizations. Very, very promising, but not fully connective.

An anatomical artist, Helen Martin, goes to Europe to find her missing husband and meets an assortment of strange and, perhaps, supernatural characters. This is fantastic, whimsical light fiction; if whimsy is not your thing, you may feel like you've been sucked into a bad episode of "Twin Peaks"; however I enjoyed Helen's quest quite a bit. The ending of this story is more conclusive than the ending of Hodgson's last fiction, The Tattooed Map. The Sensualist is comparable to Nick Bantock's The Venetian's Wife, although I think the Bantock book is a little better. Warning: If you're a fan of toy and movable books you should know that although The Sensualist has several beautifully rendered drawings and fold-outs (I loved the fold-out brain drawing on page 122), there aren't as many pictures in this as in The Tattooed Map. The Sensualist is more of a full-sized novel (295 pages) than the slim The Tattooed Map.

I was immediately intrigued by flipping through the pages of this book. Anatomical illustrations abound, in the style of the Flemish and Italian masters. I couldn't put this book down, the mystery was so complex and interesting. We are carried through several destinations, the author is obviously well-traveled, as her descriptions illuminate the text and give one the feeling of being absorbed in the moment. However, after a marvelous build-up, the conclusion left something to be desired. Many references and activities were never explained, and the reader feels a sense of dissapointment and vagueness. As I read the book, I waited for all things to fall into place at the end, and I was left hanging. The author writes well and the story line is fascinating, so I would recommend reading this book for enjoyment and accept that the mystery is still unanswered.

Hodgson certainly doesn't beat around the bush, establishing the eerie mood of this unique novel with her opening sentence: "Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else's breasts." If that doesn't catch your attention, Helen's encounters on the train from Munich to Vienna should. A grotesque female doctor gives Helen an antique wooden box filled with medical memorabilia for her "search"; an old woman, accompanied by a young man wearing eye makeup, demands in vain that Helen change her seat, then leaves her a diamond ring; and a talking dog offers her a new pair of shoes, while his mistress plops herself down and begins to shave her legs.

A combination of a fever dream and a nightmare, this strikingly illustrated novel explores the five senses and the anatomy associated with them, as Helen, a specialist in anatomical illustration, searches for her missing husband and expands her vision of life's possibilities. Martin, her husband, is a journalist who has been investigating art fraud in Europe, specifically fraud involving the woodblocks used to reproduce the anatomical studies of Vesalius in 1543. Helen's mysterious wooden box includes a Vesalius woodcut, which may provide a key to unraveling Martin's disappearance, but the contents of the box are always changing, as virtually everyone Helen meets either adds or subtracts objects. A series of new mysteries emerge, involving horrible murders and suicides among the people Helen has met.

While the book is certainly intriguing in many ways, Hodgson pushes the envelope so far that I wondered if she were deliberately trying to out-weird all other contemporary authors with her plot. The "willing suspension of disbelief" ended early for me. Unlike some other readers, I did not find the book "light," or "whimsical." Rather, I found it dark and gloomy, filled with depressing visions of raw humanity. The illustrations, which are beautifully produced and amazingly clever in their fold-outs, are, nevertheless, anatomical drawings and woodcuts, so esoteric an aspect of "art history," that I found it difficult to see why the Helen (and the author) found them so intrinsically interesting. This is an amazing book--but I didn't find it a very pleasant one. Mary Whipple

Hodgson has divided her chapters into each of the human senses. Very clever idea...and it works. The mystery is not as interesting as the characters she writes about or as interesting as the historical anatomy lesson.

The start of this book captured my attention. It begins with Helen, a loyal wife seeking her missing husband - still loyal, whether or not he's worth being loyal to. Early in her journey, she encounters some very odd people and receives a mysterious gift. A touch of the supernatural swirls around it, and around the people she encounters. The theme of the senses gets support from Helen's long experience in anatomical art. Eerie touches in the story, combined with complex collages throughout the book, set my hopes in the direction of Nick Bantock's better work.

Somehow, the story never builds. Elements that could have lent drama seem to fizzle. Connections between characters never tie the story together. Then, the ending just terminates the book without resolving it. The husband's absence, though ended, stays unresolved, the supernatural elements just end without explanation. The means of a bizarre murder go unexplained, even though the murder demands explanation in terms of the murderer. The writing carried me to the end, then unceremoniously dumped me.

-- wiredweird

Barbara Hodgsons attention to detail made this page turner impossible to put down. It was like a twist a plot book, taking unexpected turns throughout this murder mystery told through ghosts. It left me thirsty for more.