Summary:

Dr. Robert Weiss passes through the town of Sankt Vero in the Tirol and rents a room from the Lukasser family. During the night, the Lukasser's son, Niki, develops acute appendicitis; the visiting doctor operates right there on the kitchen table, saving the boy's life. Years later, when war rages in Europe, the Jewish doctor returns to Sankt Vero and knocks on the Lukasser's door. He tells of soldiers forcing men, women, and children into railroad cars, and how he himself--he who had saved Niki years before--needs asylum.

To hide Dr. Weiss, Mr. Lukasser boards him up in a small room in the back of the hayloft, a space one meter wide and three meters high. For two years, the doctor exists in this box. Niki and his friend, a blind girl named Sigi, bring Dr. Weiss food once a day and, for ten minutes or so, they stay and talk. Sustained by Niki and Sigi's lives--the stories of their discoveries of sexuality, cruelty, and love--the doctor survives.

Although Sigi is blind, she has the insight to recognize and try to alleviate the doctor's growing depression by encouraging him to tell his own stories. It is through these stories and through the doctor's observation of Sigi and Niki's blossoming adolescence and struggles with morality that we experience both the doctor's confinement and the powerful conflicts and transformations that rage behind the doors of Sankt Vero.

View full annotation

Summary:

This novel is the fictionalized account of author Thomas Moran's real-life experience as a patient with disseminated chicken pox. During his five months in hospital, much of that time on a ventilator, Moran experienced "coma visions" and near death which he retells here through his alter ego, James Blatchely, a man who struggles to remain emotionally alive in spite of the virus's physical assault. Blatchely does this by observing, befriending, and then fantasizing a life for his two Irish nurses--Brigit who, he discovers, uses drugs to endure the pain she witnesses daily in Intensive Care, and Nuala, with whom he falls in love.

Through the depiction of Blatchely's erratic, inching descent toward death, readers gain visceral insight into a patient's encounter with critical illness--but the real heroes of this book are the nurses. We observe them through Blatchely's eyes, and they are the force that enables him to survive, if not in body, at least in mind. This beautifully written novel creates a world in which both patients and caregivers are fully human, bound together by their shared experience of the patient's illness and by the life the imagination enjoys when the body cannot.

View full annotation