Wrenaissance Readers

Fiction

How had I never noticed this before? Could it be that the poor little orphan of my memory was harbouring vengeful fantasies? Had I all along been mistaking a gothic character for a Dickensian one? It’s with assumptions such as this that Jean Rhys plays in her fabulously atmospheric exploration of the life of the first Mrs Rochester.

Antoinette Conway is an orphan, too, as a Creole heiress marooned in Jamaica, in the ruins of a slaving culture that has made her a pariah to her black neighbours. When she is a child, the family mansion is torched and a girl whom she wants to be her friend throws a rock at her head – incidents that resound with distorted echoes of Jane Eyre.

There is nothing idyllic about life on this island, and Dominican-born Rhys is brilliant at evoking the swarming oppressiveness of relentless sunshine. Where Brontë’s gothic is cold and dark, Rhys’s sweats and swelters. “I knew the time of day when though it is hot and blue and there are no clouds, the sky can have a very black look,” says Antoinette, who nevertheless finds razor grass, red ants and snakes “better, better than people”.

Into this hallucinatory inversion of an island paradise blunders Edward Rochester, a malarial younger son in search of a fortune, who picks up the narrative in the second section with his own sense of alienation: “Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near.”

–excerpted from The Guardian

Nonfiction

If you enjoy medical case histories that are sensitive yet lively, weird but informative, then Sacks’ book is your ticket.

A neurologist who writes with wit and zest, he will fascinate you with stories of patients like the man in the title—a professor who couldn’t recognize faces and who patted the tops of fire hydrants believing them to be children. Nietschze asked whether we could do without disease in our lives and the author explores this interesting concept with a rare and invigorating philosophic sense. Sacks is no ordinary practitioner; his patients suffer from rare complaints like Korshakov’s syndrome, Tourette’s and other afflictions, some of which make the patient unsure of the reality of his own body. Their tragedies and their courage are joined with the author’s astute professionalism and humanity to make for a riveting foray into the unknown. The history of these strange cases and the state of the art of medicine are deftly probed. Yet in the midst of all this tragedy, there is an eerie comic quality. Take the 80-year-old ex-prostitute who discovers a new liveliness and euphoria, which she enjoys immensely. However, the reason for this is a recurrence of an old syphilis infection. Does she want to be totally cured and lose this new found ebullience? Not really. She relishes “Cupid’s disease’s” strange excitation of her cerebral cortex too much. To Sacks’ credit, he agrees with her.This book ranks with the very best of its genre. It will inform and entertain anyone, especially those who find medicine an intriguing and mysterious art.

–from Kirkus Reviews