Summary:

This great literate novel is the tale of Hans Castorp, the "delicate child of life" whom we first meet at age 23, ambivalently embarking on a career as a ship-building engineer in his home city of Hamburg, Germany. Before beginning his professional work, however, he journeys on what is intended to be a vacation and a pro forma visit to see his tubercular cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, at a sanatorium in the mountain town of Davos, Switzerland. Yet as the train pursues its course through the alpine scenery, Hans and the reader become aware that this is no ordinary journey. The impressionable Hans is transported away from the life and obligations he has known, to the rarefied mountain environment and insular community of the sanatorium.

At first uneasy, he soon becomes fascinated with and drawn to the routine established for the "consumptives" and to the social scene which flourishes there. Ordinary life seems increasingly unreal to him; his perceptions are heightened and he becomes aware of his physical, spiritual, and emotional vulnerability, as well as of his own sexuality. He is greatly attracted to one of the patients, a married woman of Slavic background, Madame Clavdia Chauchat. She reminds him of a schoolboy to whom he had been strangely drawn as a child. The turmoil brought on by this romantic obsession seems even to be reflected in his physical state, which is unstable and feverish.

As his intended stay of three weeks nears its close, the director of the sanatorium advises Hans to stay on to recuperate from a heavy cold, which appears to reveal an underlying case of tuberculosis. Hans is almost relieved at this news, for it provides him with a reason for remaining near Madame Chauchat as well as the opportunity to continue intriguing, profound discussions and cogitation about illness, life, time, death, religion and world view initiated by another patient, Herr Settembrini.

Settembrini is an Italian man of letters and humanist who believes that reason and the intellect must and will prevail, in daily life as well as in world affairs. He is contemptuous of the foolish flirtations and empty talk in which most of the sanatorium inhabitants indulge, and warns Hans repeatedly of the dangers inherent in cutting off all ties to real life and responsibility.

Nevertheless, Hans remains at the sanatorium for seven years, freeing himself from the constraints and conventions of life "in the flatlands" and instead engaging in a prolonged "questioning of the universe." This questioning includes a critical flirtation with death, stunningly described in the chapter, "Snow." Hans does not return home until the outbreak of World War I, in which he fights and survives.

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Summary:

This is an autobiographical novel in which the author relates the emotional life of a childhood and young manhood lived with cerebral palsy. The disease is never named (except on the fly-leaf of the book cover); its impact is revealed through incidents and personal relationships experienced by the protagonist in a narration which reflects by its style, the intellectual maturation from childhood to adulthood.

As a child, Felix spends long periods in a children’s home, to receive therapy and educational training, and to relieve his family of the strain of his care. Felix learns to walk with painstaking effort and surges of determination, but the reactions of others, even of his mother, make clear that he is not normal. His social life is complicated by anti-semitism and by just being from a different religious background. With puberty comes sexual longing and the need for female affection, and eventually the painful recognition that his desire will not be reciprocated. What saves Felix is the life of the mind and a love of literature and writing which a few influential mentors and a clever, similarly disabled friend help him to develop.

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Summary:

The story begins with Theodore Roosevelt's funeral. The narrator, a reporter with the New York Times, decides to tell a story that happened more than 20 years earlier in 1896 when Roosevelt was Police Commissioner of New York City. A serial killer is murdering young male prostitutes.

Roosevelt invites the infamous Dr. Laszlo Kreizler to form a special unit to track down the killer. The unit also includes the narrator and three members of the police department. Kreizler's qualification is that he is an alienist who champions the radical new concept of forensic psychiatry: the belief that one can predict a criminal's behavior by reconstructing his personality based on evidence in the crimes themselves. This concept smacks of determinism. Thus, Kreizler was violently opposed by many, including the religious establishment, who believed Kreizler was denying that people were morally responsible for their crimes.

Because of the sensitivity of their mission, the small investigative unit operates secretly, but runs into powerful opposition. Over several months Kreizler and his colleagues perform the seemingly impossible job of identifying and tracking down the killer, using Kreizler's psychological methods.

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Summary:

The country doctor, Monsieur Benassis, practices in a village called Voreppe at the base of the Grande Chartreuse Mountains. He is a seedy and unkempt, but very kind-hearted, bachelor of 50 who lives with his authoritarian housekeeper. Benassis was brought up in the country, but had lived for many years in Paris where he enjoyed a dissipated life and loved two women. He left the first, only to learn later that she bore him a son and died of heart disease. Later his illegitimate son died.

His second love, Evelina, broke off their engagement when her parents objected to the suitor’s sordid past. Benassis became very depressed and considered suicide. After visiting a monastery in the Grand Chartreuse region, he decided to move to Voreppe and devote his life to serving the poor rural people. He not only practices medicine, but over the years has also initiated a number of economic and community development projects in the area.

Above the village is a hamlet that contains a dozen cretins among the thirty families who live there. Cretinism is common in the region. Dr. Benassis decides that it would be good for the public health to have all the cretins sent to an asylum in Aiguebelle, some distance away. When Benassis becomes mayor, he arranges to have the cretins transported to Aiguebelle, despite opposition from the local people. One cretin remains "to be fed and cared for as the adopted child of the commune."

Benassis later moves the other inhabitants of the hamlet to a new, more fertile, site in the valley and installs an irrigation system for them. At the end of the novel, Benassis has a stroke and dies. He is the first to be buried in the new cemetery.

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Summary:

In this novel, with the help of some friends, Gregor Samsa has survived his seeming death at the end of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and joined a freak show in Vienna. A little man named Amadeus Hoffnung, who suffers from Werner’s syndrome (premature aging), runs this Chamber of Wonders. The human sized cockroach proves to be a big hit with the public and a good friend for his assorted colleagues, who come to admire his optimism, compassion, and sense of social responsibility. Gregor thrives, except for the festering wound in his carapace (back) that will not heal--the wound made when his father threw an apple at him during his traumatic early life in "Metamorphosis" as a human-turned-insect.

In 1923, as a result of an life-changing encounter with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in the context of growing anti-Semitism in Central Europe, Gregor flies (literally) to New York, where he takes up residence and soon runs into Mr. Charles Ives, the composer and insurance executive, who gives him a job as an actuary. The novel describes Gregor’s subsequent adventures over the next 20 years--as a surprise witness at the Scopes trial, as the subject of Ives’s famous "Insect" Piano Sonata, and finally as the confidant of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and member of his "brain trust." Along the way, Gregor contributes greatly to the science of risk analysis and management.

In 1943, at the president’s request, Gregor joins the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he serves as risk analyst and all-around moral questioner during the bomb’s development. Finally, Gregor Samsa, having survived 30 years as an insect, becomes physically ill as the old apple-infection turns to septicemia; and he becomes existentially ill, as he confronts the implications of nuclear warfare. He decides to commit suicide by placing himself among the instruments at Ground Zero of Trinity site, vaporizing in the explosion of the first atomic bomb; indeed, "Gregor’s was the most expensive assisted suicide in history." (p. 458)

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Summary:

The twin of the title is Helmer van Wonderen. He is a 54 year old dairy farmer in Noord-Holland, the northwest peninsula of the Netherlands and the year is 2002, 35 years after his only sibling, his twin brother Henk, died. Henk was the front seat passenger of a car driven by Henk's fiancée, Riet, when the car plunged into lake Ijssel. Riet lived; Henk drowned. Helmer's life immediately changed from that of a 19 year old university student in Dutch linguistics to a farmer and successor to their father, a tyrannical and distinctly unlovable man. Henk had been the father's clear favorite, if we accept Helmer's and the narrator's viewpoints. Helmer stays a bachelor and maintains the farm into the present, the time of the novel. His father is elderly and confined to the upstairs. Helmer treats him with disdain; he feeds and bathes him with barely disguised contempt awaiting his death with a vague sense of hope, symbolized by Helmer's re-organizing and painting the interior of their house at the beginning of the book.

Abruptly Riet, a recently widowed mother of three, re-enters the van Wonderen world with a letter requesting Helmer to allow her youngest child, an 18 year old son, also named Henk, to live with Helmer as a farmhand. Riet wants her son Henk to learn farming and discipline and receive the parental (read "fatherly") direction she feels he needs and she cannot supply. Helmer consents. Henk comes to live with him, working desultorily as a hired hand.

Riet and Helmer become estranged over the latter's lying to her that his father was dead when in fact he was upstairs at the time of her only visit to their home since her fiancé's death. One day Henk saves Helmer's life when the latter becomes pinned by a sheep in a ditch. Henk leaves soon thereafter; the father dies; and a Frisian farmhand from Helmer's youth re-appears at the time of the father's funeral. He and Helmer take off, after Helmer sells the farm, to Denmark, a much vaunted Shangri-La for Dutch farmers in this novel.

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Summary:

Barney Panofsky--like so many of Richler’s protagonists (and like Richler himself, one suspects)--is a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, foul-mouthed, hedonistic writer and producer. He has many sexual exploits in his past and loads of self doubt in his present, together with digitalis and dentures.

But there was only one true love in his life, although he has had three wives: Clara a mysterious artist-poetess whose suicide in Paris helped to establish his fame; "the second Mrs. Panofsky" whom he loathed for all of their short time together; and Miriam, mother of his three children and his partner for decades, until Barney blows it with presumptuous inattention culminating in a vain indiscretion, and she leaves.

Since the end of his second marriage, Barney has lived under the shadow of the unproven accusation of having murdered his best friend, Bernard "Boogie" Moscovitch. Supposedly, he committed the crime in a drunken rage provoked by his discovery of Boogie in flagrante with "the second Mrs Panofsky." Barney may have been drunk, but he didn’t do it. At least, he doesn’t remember doing it.

Barney’s "version" is an autobiographical account written in old age, and annotated with footnotes by his priggish and obsessive son. It is Barney’s side of the murder and his life, and it leads up to and devolves from that fateful evening when, far from being angry, he felt joy in a bedroom scene that would be his ticket to live with Miriam.

He recalls drinking with Boogie and their going for a swim. But he alone still expects to see Boogie stride through the door. Everyone else, including his children, believe that he was the killer, spared imprisonment because Boogie’s body was never found. The weight of Barney’s guilt waxes and wanes.

But remembering anything is increasingly difficult for Barney. He fears dementia. As its specter looms over his memories, it raises doubt about the veracity of his "version."

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Summary:

Aging, Jewish-Canadian gum-shoe, Benny Cooperman, awakes in hospital from a coma to discover that he has forgotten many things about himself and his recent past. He has also lost the ability to read, although he still can write: alexia sine agraphia. The therapists give him a memory book as an aide to functional recovery; he must record vital information for later deciphering. He learns that he was found unconscious in a dumpster with a blow to the head; beside him lay the corpse of a woman professor.

Leaving the hospital only once (without permission), Cooperman uses dogged determination and ingenuity to unravel the complex academic homicide. Adapting to his own disability proves just as demanding to Cooperman as solving the murder. Without giving away the ending, this "whodunit" involves premonitory dreams, pretty students, rogue professors, a crusty underworld, and drugs. Engel's trademark light touch and vignettes of Toronto and its University colleges and hospitals add humor and credibility to the vivid yarn.

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Summary:

Robin Carr, a Torontonian in her mid-twenties, has serious inflammatory bowel disease, which by the end of the book has lead to twelve abdominal operations. The story begins as she anticipates further surgery to close her ostomy and create a pelvic pouch. Failure of the surgical procedure seems to bring about failure of her marriage. She is reminded of her father's own experience with an ostomy and his death of bowel cancer, as she establishes new relationships and grapples with her mortality and the possibility that she may never be able to have children.

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Summary:

In 1917, the poet Siegfried Sassoon protests the war in a London newspaper. He is saved from court martial by a military friend who argues successfully for his transfer to the Craiglockhart War Hospital where he comes under the care of psychiatrist, William Rivers. Sassoon is not sick, but he and his doctor both know that the line between sanity and insanity is blurred, especially for a homosexual and in a time of war.

The other patients, however, are gravely wounded in spirit if not body; sometimes they are tormented by uncomprehending parents and wives. Rivers’ efforts to unravel their nightmares, revulsions, mutism, stammering, paralysis, and anorexia begin to shake his own psychic strength and lead him to doubt the rationality--if not the possibility--of restoring them to service. He yearns for his pre-war research in nerve regeneration, the quixotic enterprise that serves as a metaphor for his clinical work.

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