A journey round my skull [Unknown Binding]

Frigyes Karinthy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1949

The distinguished Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy was sitting in a Budapest café, wondering whether to write a long-planned monograph on modern man or a new play, when he was disturbed by the roaring—so loud as to drown out all other noises—of a passing train. Soon it was gone, only to be succeeded by another. And another. Strange, Karinthy thought, it had been years since Budapest had streetcars. Only then did he realize he was suffering from an auditory hallucination of extraordinary intensity.

What in fact Karinthy was suffering from was a brain tumor, not cancerous but hardly benign, though it was only much later—after spells of giddiness, fainting fits, friends remarking that his handwriting had altered, and books going blank before his eyes—that he consulted a doctor and embarked on a series of examinations that would lead to brain surgery. Karinthy’s description of his descent into illness and his observations of his symptoms, thoughts, and feelings, as well as of his friends’ and doctors’ varied responses to his predicament, are exact and engrossing and entirely free of self-pity. A Journey Round My Skull is not only an extraordinary piece of medical testimony, but a powerful work of literature—one that dances brilliantly on the edge of extinction.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Karinthy’s book is, to my mind, a masterpiece. We are inundated now with medical memoirs, both biographical and autobiographical–the entire genre has exploded in the last twenty years. Yet even though the technology may have changed, the human experience has not, and Journey Around My Skull, the first autobiographical description of a journey inside the brain, remains one of the very best.” --Oliver Sacks (from the Introduction)

“The first patient’s-eye-view account of a brain operation in medical history…remarkable.” –Time

“The London Evening Standard called A Journey Round My Skull…an extraordinary book. The New Statesman and Nation called it a very remarkable book. The Spectator an unusual and extremely interesting book. The Glasgow Herald a terrible and marvelous book. The British Medical Journal a book of the highest value. This chorus of praise is not too strong…A Journey Round My Skull is a document that few other men would have written and that no reader will easily forget.” –The New York Times

“Here is a book of surpassing interest and power…Written with utmost clarity and candor, Karinthy’s account of his illness and operation is a compelling, unique achievement which needs no artifice…the patient’s narrative holds the reader in a spell.” –Los Angeles Times

“Pirandello could not have written it better…a triumph of writing, a very remarkable book.” –The New Statesman

“It would be impossible to read anything so moving, so frightening or so exciting…a terrible and marvelous book. It will be treasured by the courageous reader for its beauty, its poetry and its revelation of an experience that happily comes to few men.” –John O’London’s Weekly

“A remarkable subject, and the book is as remarkable as its subject. Not a touch of morbidity adheres to the story…indeed an extraordinary book.” –The Evening Standard

“This unusual and extremely interesting book…as well as being a brilliantly imaginative record of an illness, the book is also a very revealing autobiography.”–The Spectator

"Karinthy was a magnificent parodist and a ruthless but never pompous social critic. His poetry was a mixture of carefully polished, effectively classicist and broadly-rolling, Whitmanesque verse." –Adam Makkai

“Karinthy gives a minute description of his ‘skull,’ a description that covers both the physical and psychological…but he also incorporates his readings (Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brethern, Scott’s account of his journeys to the South Pole, Jules Verne’s Michel Strogoff) and a variety of philosophical musings…What a pleasure to sit down with a witty, urbane, eminently well educated human being, to bask in his presence as he recounts to you something of vital importance to him. We could do with a few more Karinthys nowadays.” –The Hungarian Quarterly

A “brilliant humorist and prose-writer.” –The Independent [UK]

“[Karinthy] possesses the sharp and biting satire of Voltaire; the provocative doubt of Shaw; the poetic fantasy of Maeterlinck. Karinthy is a universal literary genius: playwright, humorist, poet, novelist, critic, essayist, literary caricaturist, etc…He has that rare ability of our own Charlie Chaplin, in that whatever he attempts to do, he can make us feel that he is a genius.” –Los Angeles Times

“This book is both a human document and a piece of authentic literature, not devoid of humor.” –The New York Times --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Frigyes Karinthy (1887—1938) was a Hungarian author, playwright, poet, journalist, and translator. He was the first proponent of the six degrees of separation concept in his 1929 short story, L‡ncszemek (Chains). Karinthy is known in English for his novellas Voyage to Faremido and Capillaria. Father of Ferenc Karinthy, he remains one Hungary’s most popular writers.

Oliver Sacks practices neurology in New York City. His books include Awakenings, Uncle Tungsten, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Unknown Binding: 288 pages
• Publisher: Faber and Faber (1949)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0007JZEH8
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and insightful, August 11, 2008

By 

Lisa C. Hamilton (Marietta, GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Journey Round My Skull (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

I purchased this book because, upon browsing it in the bookstore, it mirrored much of my experience with seizures and brain surgery. His descriptions and the unreal experience of having a brain disease hit the bulls eye. The floating, stream of conciousness-like storytelling brings home the feelings involved with such a curious experience. I'm enjoying it immensely.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dreamlike Narration of Illness, July 2, 2008

By 

Gary Schroeder "GS23" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Journey Round My Skull (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

A Journey Round My Skull appears (based on reviews and cover blurbs) to be a classic of the 'sick patient' genre. I'm not exactly sure why. I found it to be a little challenging to stick with to the end. Part of the problem is the stilted translation from Karinthy's native language. It never flows well and reads very much like a translation inasmuch as the english phrases seem awkward, rough and not-quite-right. I almost never forgot that I was in fact reading a translation -- surely a sign of a less than stellar job.

That aside, Karinthy's style never really caught on with me. What I expected to be a straight-up tale of what happens to a patient with a brain tumor saddled with diagnosis and treatment using only mid-20th century technology, turned out to be a more dreamlike, stream of consciousness experience that was often a little confusing. Also surprising was Karinthy's baffling attitude at being stricken with a brain tumor. Never did he admit to self-pity, sadness or fear for the future. Instead he tells his story from a detached, "what will be will be" perspective. It's rather hard for me to imagine facing blindness and possible death with such a cavalier attitude. I question if he really did either.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The view from the outside in, March 16, 2008

By 

Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Journey Round My Skull (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

In the spring of 1936, Frigyes (Frederic) Karinthy, a popular Hungarian poet, heard locomotives rumbling, reverberating, dying away. He knew there had been no trains on the streets of Budapest for 40 years. After long, exhaustive examinations Budapest neurologists told him that an egg-sized cyst webbed with tiny blood vessels was sprouting on the right side of his brain, back of his cerebellum. Karinthy's wife took him to Stockholm and Dr. Herbert Olivecrona.

Oliver Sachks asks: "Were doctors in Budapest in 1936, worse than doctors in, say, New York or London seventy years later? ... [O]ne needs to remember ... how difficult and delicate an art it was, seventy years ago, to diagnose and locate a cerebral tumor." Ether could not be used -- it would congest brain blood vessels. Karinthy remained awake during the operation. This book is the first patient's account of a brain operation in medical history.

Much of the book is autobiographical, but in chapter "Avdeling 13" Karinthy describes the operation itself.

"I felt them wheel me under the lamp. I felt a succession of little pricks in a wide circle ... on my head. Then . . . one long horizontal incision at the back of my neck. This did not hurt me either. I felt soft gestures, as if my flesh were being opened and folded back.

"There was a sudden jerk as if [Dr. Olivecrona] had seized the opening with a pair of forceps. It was followed by a straining sensation, a feeling of pressure, a cracking sound, and a terrific wrench. . . . Something broke with a dull noise. . . . Each cracking sound reminded me of taking the lid off a jamjar, while the process as a whole was like splitting open a wooden packing case, plank by plank. . . .

"A veritable fury of destruction seized hold of me. Break it up! I wanted to shout. Smash away! Bust it to bits! Everything had gone red in front of my eyes. If I had had an axe or a lump of iron in my hand I should have hit out with it and smashed up myself and everyone else with the wild recklessness of a maniac.

"Once the trephining of the skull was over . . . my mood underwent a change. There was a sound of pumping and draining and I could hear the drip, drip of a liquid. Although my brain didn't hurt at all, it did hurt me when one of the instruments fell on to the glass with a sharp, metallic sound. A certain idea passing through my mind hurt me too. It had nothing to do with my present situation. . . ."

Three hours after the operation began, the poet lost consciousness. Three weeks later, Karinthy went back to his Budapest cafés, and heard no more nonexistent locomotives.

His report from the operating table is compelling, and the autobiographical sections are also interesting as. "I felt absolutely at peace. This was no longer my whole life; it was just one afternoon. It might be that I was very ill. Perhaps I was even going to die. Yet this had nothing to do with that afternoon, nor I with the man born to sorrow from the day he came into the world."

And again: "Throughout nature, every living body has two aspects--one connected with its private functions and individual life, and one which we may call the sexual. Each of our organs has likewise two aspects, adapted for completely different purposes. Thus, the eye is not merely an instrument of vision, but an alluring jewel, an ever-burning lamp, whose sparkle inflames the opposite sex."

Finally: "Reality as a genre requires no helping hand from the artist."

This book makes a great companion to My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor who writes about her journey inside her brain. Both are compelling reading.

Robert C. Ross 2008