A Journey Round My Skull (New York Review Books Classics) | 
| Author: Frigyes Karinthy
Creators: Oliver Sacks, Vernon Duckworth Barker
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
Buy New: $10.84
You Save: $9.16 (46%)
New (24) Used (5) from $10.25
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 43143
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 312
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5 x 0.7
ISBN: 1590172582
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.196994810092
EAN: 9781590172582
ASIN: 1590172582
Publication Date: March 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The distinguished Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy was sitting in a Budapest cafe, 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.
|
| Customer Reviews:
The view from the outside in March 16, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
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 cafes, 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 by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor who writes about her journey inside her brain. Both are compelling reading.
|
|
|
