The Law of White Spaces - Hardcover

Giorgio Pressburger

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679420487 ISBN 13: 9780679420484

Publisher: Pantheon, 1992

Synopsis

Five compelling case studies by an Italian film director are united by their obsession with the mysteries of the human condition of illness that lie beyond the certainties of science and language. 12,500 first printing. $15,000 ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author

Giorgio Pressburger was born in Budapest in 1937, and emigrated to Italy in 1956. He works as a film andtheatre director and divides his time between Rome and Trieste.

Piers Spence is a former associate editor of Granta. His  translation of Giorgio Pressburger's The Law of White Spaces was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award in 1992.

From the Back Cover

"Giorgio Pressburger is writing literature which exploits the notion of the clinical as a metaphor of the dreadful silences underneath the surface of the language. He's not giving us case histories cast in an amusingly anecdotal fashion; he's writing in the mode of Kafka." - Jonathan Miller

From the Inside Flap

A mesmerizing and frightening work of fiction like no other, The Law of White Spaces comprises five compelling case studies unified by their obsession with what Oliver Sacks has called "the quintessential human condition of sickness." Gentle in their telling, at times quietly erotic, always savagely honest, these stories-about loss and desire, family and love-point to mysteries beyond the certainties of science and language.

Reviews

These five haunting, beautifully written stories, set in an unnamed Hungarian city, deal with doctors and patients in extreme situations. In "Vera," a disturbing tale of obsession, an American physician doing relief work in post-WW II Hungary develops a morbid, semi-erotic attachment to a epileptic, mute 16-year-old girl. Determined to break her silence by any means, he yields to violent impulses, destroying his marriage and career. The title story profiles a doctor who swings between denial and terror at his worsening amnesia. In "Clock of Life" a desperately lonely septuagenarian whose amnesiac husband is half-mad from brain disease makes sexual advances to her physican, whom she had known when he was a boy. "Bahdy's Disease" depicts doctors' ignorance and illness as symptoms of spiritual imbalance. In "Choices" an elderly widow decides to go on living rather than join her just-deceased husband in death or their son in Canada. Pressburger, a Hungarian-born film director who lives in Italy, provides a fascinating and often frightening look at the human condition in these elegantly translated tales.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Themes of illness, instability, and death are woven through the five stories in this collection. In these "case-studies," the protagonist in each case is a physician who encounters a sudden, unexpected, inexplicable experience while treating a patient, an event that the doctor tries to comprehend through scientific reasoning. But his medical training fails to help him unravel what is happening, and he begins a mental decline, precipitated by a lack of emotional control, which ends in "madness" not unlike that encountered in many existentialist novels. In the title story, representative of the entire collection, Dr. Fleischmann experiences a gradual and total loss of memory, which leads to an interesting meditation on the meaning of memory and whether a human ceases to exist after memory fades. Offering bizarre stories, sometimes verging on the pathetic, this uneven collection will appeal to readers of contemporary bete noir fiction.
- Olivia Opello, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse,
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679420487
• ISBN 13: 9780679420484
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 172