barbara hodgson is singular in her style, this is one of her better books ( )

Confusing. Not an easy-read by far. I did, however enjoy the brief glimpses of Europe. (The pop-up style of the book was also intriguing.) If you can keep up, this is a mildly interesting ghost story. ( )

Helen Martin, an art historian who's particularly taken with medical illustrations, has left the New World in search of her mysteriously absent husband, Martin Evans. The two have been apart many times before (he's a journalist after all), but this time no one, not even his mother, knows where he has gone. The novel begins with the feverish Helen snaking by train across Europe on the way to Martin's last known location, Vienna. Along the way, she becomes entangled in a plot involving a murder in an anatomical art museum.
This sounds, at first glance, like the premise of a run-of-the-mill missing-persons detective story. But Barbara Hodgson embellishes this simple tale with a baroque narrative style that suggests a symbolic order to Helen's anxious search. The mystery entwines with Helen's metaphysical and emotional quest for solace after the death of her relationship. Helen becomes obsessed with bodies--her own and those of her fellow travelers: "Helen woke up wearing someone else's eyes. Eyes that shattered her orbs into a thousand piercing splinters, that shook her balance off its pivot and flung her headlong into a mercurial fog." In several similar waking scenes, Helen imagines her breasts swelling and shrinking or her body parts mingling with others' as they look on. Throughout the book, she sees and feels and tastes and touches with fine-grained detail, and her bizarre body consciousness moves so easily from a dreamlike fantasy back into the prose of the mystery narrative that a dogmatic reader is apt to become frustrated if he or she demands a dogged pursuit of clues and solutions. But straightforward mystery is not Hodgson's method. The intersubjectivity of her characters is drawn in a poetic language that, like the exquisite and macabre color illustrations interlaced with the text, are meant to estrange sensory experiences and evoke consciousness of embodied existence. ( )

This is a very strange mystery. It begins rather like a David Lynch film: A young woman sits in a train compartment, when a huge and odd woman wearing an alarming wig and accompanied by a foppish young man sits in her compartment. The enormous woman gives her a peculiar gift, even as her dog offers to get her a new pair of shoes. The gift- a strange, locked box.
The young woman is Helen Martin, an art historian who specializes in medical illustration, who is headed to Vienna to find her absentee husband. While there, she becomes embroiled in a mystery that is utterly unique and strange.
The writing feels almost baroque, and is perfectly matched with the illustrations by Nick Bantock, famed for his conundrums. The entire book is a conundrum. ( )

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone unless I knew they were interested in anatomy and/or Vienna or Munich. I thought it was incredibly strange, but not delightfully so. ( )