Summary:

Fifteen selections--short stories, essays, and memoir--make up this collection. Two stories are notable: The Whistlers' Room and Atrium: October 2001 (see annotations). The title story is a translation and retelling of an obscure German tale published 75 years ago. Set in a military hospital in Germany during World War I, four soldiers share a common wound--throat injuries and laryngeal damage necessitating a tracheostomy for each man. This remarkable quartet of patients forges a fellowship of the maimed.

"Atrium: October 2001" describes the random meeting between a physician and a terminally ill teenager in the hospital atrium. The subject of death dominates their discussion. "Parable" chronicles an elderly doctor's efforts to comfort a dying man, and in the process, ease both their suffering.

Excerpts from Selzer's diary reveal much about the character of the author as well as the characters in his life. He also reminisces about growing up in Troy, New York. Approximately one-quarter of the book is devoted to Selzer's musings on works of art (sculpture and painting). Lighter fare includes a discussion of life behind the podium, a description of his home, and a new ending for A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

View full annotation

Summary:

The narrator, a schoolteacher substituting in a "stagnant, godforsaken little place" in the west of Ireland, meets an old woman that everyone in town calls "The Creature." She decides to visit The Creature and listens to her story, eventually becoming a regular weekly visitor at her hut.

The Creature is a widow who has two children: a daughter who lives in Canada and a married son who lives a few miles away on a farm The Creature used to own. Her husband had been killed, a victim of The Troubles two years after they were married. Thus, she had to raise the children alone.

Originally her farm was relatively prosperous, but the animals had all developed hoof-and-mouth disease and died. Nonetheless, she managed to keep body and soul together and to send the children away to school. Her son returned from the city after marrying a woman who despised The Creature. He and his wife had moved into the farm, but the young couple argued every night about money and the mother's presence, so The Creature signed the farm over to her son and moved away. That was 17 years ago; he had never visited her since.

The narrator goes to the farm, meets the son (by this time a passive and depressed middle aged man), and arranges for him to visit his mother. He does this, but the visit goes poorly. The narrator finally realizes that she has actually removed the last little glimmer of hope the old woman had; before seeing her son again, she could always hope that someday the two would be reunited, but after he visits, she realizes that he doesn't care about her and will probably never come back.

View full annotation

Summary:

The House of God is a chronicle of Roy Basch's internship year at a prestigious Boston teaching hospital, also known as The House of God but clearly modeled after the Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Hospital. Cycling through various medical disciplines, Roy and his peers learn medicine from the eccentric, irreverent, yet oddly compassionate Fat Man, whose 13 Laws of the House of God cynically summarize the harrowing and often demeaning hospital practices and rituals reflected in both the doctor-patient relationship and in the residency experience itself.

View full annotation

Summary:

This is a collection of sonnets written by Jane Yolen, a well--known children’s book author, during her husband’s 43-day course of radiation therapy for an inoperable brain tumor. In an introductory note, she explains that "each evening after David was safely in bed" she composed a sonnet and "poured (her) feelings onto the page."

Day 1 begins, "Do not go, my love--oh, do not leave so soon . . . " She soon directs her anger at the limitations of technology (Day 4, "The damned machine has broken, cracked . . . ") as David develops side effects of treatment (Day 8, "Sucking candies"; Day 11, "Confusion"). The stakes rise (Day 12, "Today you did not want to eat. / We knew this day would come."), and eventually she succumbs to physical and emotional exhaustion (Day 18, "A friend drove you today, I did not go." and Day 20, "Off you go again, like a toddler to school . . . "). Family gathers; on Day 23 the youngest son arrives to visit his dozing father ("Your eyes flew open, your familiar smile / Told him his coming was worth each mile.")

Later in the course of treatment, the sonnets display the author’s uncertainty about what to believe. Should she listen to the doctor, who on Day 26 brings guardedly optimistic news ("I would not shut the gate quite yet")? Or should she believe what she sees and feels, as she cares for a man who appears to weakening and withering away? The food fights continue: "You who are sixty have just turned six: / You dissemble, deceive, eat half, call it whole." (Day 37) Patient, caretaker, family, and physician all avoid using the word death, even though it "is the one true word that lies within our reach" (Day 38).

In a postscript Jane Yolen reveals that a year after her husband’s "graduation" from radiation therapy he was doing well and, with regard to The Radiation Sonnets, he had promised to "be around for publication day."

View full annotation

Summary:

The events in Dry follow those in Burroughs's memoir of his bizarre childhood, Running with Scissors (see this database). Burroughs, at 24 years old and with no formal education beyond grade school, works in the high pressure advertising world of Manhattan. He's also an alcoholic, and his addiction definitely interferes with his work. Fortunately for Burroughs, he is not fired, but rather, his boss and co-workers set up an intervention. Burroughs--after telling his best friend, Pighead, who is HIV positive; his drinking buddy, the undertaker Jim; and his abusive, alcoholic father, of the plan--leaves for an inpatient rehabilitation program in Minnesota designed for gay people.

Thus begins Burroughs journey to sobriety. A journey that is replete with temptation, relapse (not only with alcohol, but also crack cocaine), love, success, loss, and grief. Burroughs experiences hallucinations, coma and life-threatening withdrawal. But ultimately, Burroughs achieves the title of his memoir. What he reveals is that, for an addict, remaining clean and dry is hard work. This daily, moment-by-moment work forces the addict to examine what is truly precious in life.

View full annotation

Summary:

A medical school graduate, E. A. Talbot, fails twice his qualifying examination for a position as British Army surgeon. He leaves England and vows never to return to Europe. He lands a job working for the Dutch government as the administrator of Halak-Proot, a psychiatric hospital that houses about 100 mentally ill officers and some colonists. It is located in the jungle of Java. The institution is a magnet for madness. Patients never improve and sometimes get worse there. The soldiers are more inclined to feign psychosis than return to battle.

When his father dies, Talbot inherits property. He sells it and uses the money to transform the psychiatric hospital into a luxurious estate. Cases of dementia soon plummet. The facility no longer accepts any patients except those who are indisputably insane. Soldiers somehow discover their sanity and are refused entry. Talbot grows old in his exclusive paradise that now has room for only him, a guard, and a custodian.

View full annotation

Summary:

Winterbourne, an American who has been living in the decorous city of Geneva, visits his aristocratic aunt in Vevey (Switzerland) and there meets a lovely American "girl," Daisy Miller, traveling with her ineffective mother and undisciplined younger brother. Daisy puzzles Winterbourne by her apparently artless combination of "audacity" and "innocence," as when she arranges that he should take her, alone, to see a castle. Later, in Rome, Daisy befriends what Winterbourne's aunt calls "third-rate Italians," in particular Mr. Giovanelli. She refuses the anxious advice of her friends in the American "colony" there, and her adventures escalate: walking alone with Giovanelli, unsupervised tête-à-têtes with him.

When Winterbourne finds Daisy lingering with Giovanelli, near midnight, in the Coliseum, he is relieved that the enormity of her behavior here allows him to place her at last, but he warns her of the "villainous miasma" of the arena nonetheless. Sure enough, Daisy sickens and dies of malaria--but a word from Giovanelli at her graveside convinces Winterbourne that he and the others wrongly condemned her all along. Daisy Miller was, after all, not "bad," but simply a "pretty American flirt."

View full annotation

Summary:

Just as the new plague that will eventually become known as AIDS begins to exact its toll on the gay community, William and Terry slide somewhat unintentionally into a committed relationship, complete with a dog. Terry has issues with the modest size of his penis; being "married" absolves him from performance anxiety.

Almost equally furtive, William has inherited polycystic kidney disease from his mother and is on dialysis, with the severe dietary restrictions and merciless thirst that it entails. William professes to Terry that size doesn't matter, but he indulges in elaborate fantasies about Peter Hunter, a well-endowed star of porn magazines; he becomes an obsessive collector of Hunter's work.

Terry and William are insulated by their singular bond from the havoc of AIDS, but William finds himself compelled to hunt the stigmata of that disease in photos of the exposed and hidden portions of Hunter's anatomy. When he realizes that motorbike riders are prone to becoming organ donors, he cultivates a fascination with their behavior and their machines, following them in his car and tracking statistics. Finally, a matched biker kidney is found for William, but the immunosuppressive drugs, which are given to help him tolerate the transplant, make him very ill. He is admitted with opportunistic pneumonia, ironically, to an AIDS ward.

More than once William says, "I went to sleep next to someone I knew and I woke side by side with a stranger," The book closes with a surreal dream-like sequence, as William takes leave of his lover. It could be continued life, readjusted by this brush with mortality toward a bold new freedom. On the other hand, it could be death itself, and the story suddenly becomes the memoir of a ghost.

View full annotation

Summary:

The now famed American poetess, Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge, England in 1956. Angered over a stinging review of her work by the literary roué Ted Hughes (Dennis Craig), she is then charmed by his poetry and blatantly sets out to seduce him. They marry soon after.

Sylvia had tried to commit suicide several times in her youth. Recalling one terrifying near miss, her cold-seeming mother resents Hughes, sensing the power in passionate love to harm her fragile, brilliant daughter. The initially torrid life that Ted and Sylvia share in both America and in rural Britain, grows tired through the strain of two children, her lack of joy in teaching, and his greater poetic success, all of which seem to stifle her creativity.

It ends because of his chronic infidelities, reduced in this version to a committed affair with a mutual friend, the thrice-married, Assia Wevill (Amira Casar), who becomes pregnant. Rage, jealousy, and depression become Sylvia’s muse. The more she suffers with Hughes, the more productive and poignant is her work. Unable to lure him back, she leaves buttered bread and milk for her children, seals the kitchen, and gasses herself to death.

View full annotation

Summary:

Dr. Flaherty, a practicing neurologist, sets out to explore the act of writing and, more broadly, creativity, in the context of both neuroscience and emotion. She begins by describing several brain conditions that seem to enhance the need to write, even to the extent of obsessive hypergraphia. Next she turns to the opposite state, writer's block, looking at both psychological and neuroscientific perspectives.

Using some of the recent studies of the relationships between certain brain centers and language related phenomena, Flaherty further clarifies some of the cognitive bases for creating literature. Finally, the study turns specifically to the temporal lobe as the possible organic site of the perceived voice of the muse in religious and creative inspiration.

View full annotation