The Anatomist's Dream

by Clio Gray

In a small salt-mining town, Philbert is born with a ‘taupe’, a disfiguring inflammation of the skull. Abandoned by both parents and with only a pet pig for company, he eventually finds refuge and companionship in a travelling carnival, Maulwerf’s Fair of Wonders, as it makes its annual migration across Germany bringing entertainment to a people beset by famine, repression and revolutionary ferment.

Philbert soon finds a caring family in Hermann the Fish Man, Lita, the Dancing Dwarf, Frau Fettleheim, the Fattest Woman in the World and an assortment of ‘freak show’ artists, magicians and entertainers.

But then Philbert meets Kwert, ‘Tospirologist and Teller of Signs’, and when he persuades the boy to undergo examination by the renowned physician and craniometrist, Dr Ullendorf, both Kwert and Philbert embark on an altogether darker and more perilous journey that will have far-reaching consequences for a whole nation.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Contemporary, Adult

416 pages, Hardcover

First published July 23, 2015

About the author

Clio Gray has won many awards for her writing, including the Harry Bowling First Novel Award. She has been Man Booker Nominated, Long Listed for the Baileys, and Short Listed for the Cinnamon Prize. Born in Yorkshire, she spent her later childhood in Devon before returning to Yorkshire to go to university, after which she ended up in Scotland. For the past thirty years she has lived in the Highlands where she intends to remain.
Gray eschewed the usual route of marriage, mortgage, children, and instead spent her working life in libraries, filling her home with books and sharing that home with her dogs.
When she gets a few days off you can find her in her campervan scooting around the lesser known areas of Scotland and the Highlands that haven’t been brought to ruination by the dreadful tourist push called the NC500.

Reviews

[Renita D'Silva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved this beautiful book

[Joslyn Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review posted at: https://chronicbibliophilia.wordpress...

In the cruel, cold middle of 19th century Germany, a boy is born to poverty, anomie, and a deformity that extinguishes his mother's love and marks him forever. Young Philbert has a tumorous head which dwarfs the rest of his body, a head that grows quickly and forces a premature end to his piteous childhood. As a young child, Philbert flees his hometown of Stassburg to run away with a "fair", a traveling show of freaks and feats. Here, among fellow outcasts, Philbert finds something of a home and a family for the first time in his life. But poor Philbert is cursed by more than his visible deformities; chaos and tragedy seem to follow him, with those he cares for cast about in his wake.

A by-product of Philbert's tumor is an eidetic or photographic memory.

"Philbert - who never knew his father's name - had already lived a life most extraordinary, grown like a burr that snags everything it touches, taking away a little fragment from each life, each word, each story, each loss he encountered, of which there had been many."

"It was as if his whole life was a river beside which he walked, a river that kept the reflections of his memories try and clear no matter what disturbed the waters or how far along its banks he went. His head was a treasure trove of other people's stories, a bottle into which the ships of their lives could be folded and stowed, as if he were a whirlpool at the center of his universe, sucking in everything about him."

Philbert's proclivities forge a connection between hero and reader, who essentially share the memories the story creates. And in case this connection is too tenuous, Clio Gray employs metaphors and intricate descriptions throughout her work which engage all the reader's senses. Gray seems to want her reader to gag, swoon, pant, and collapse in time with her characters. The result can be sensory overload, the reading a visceral, exhausting experience.

"We all make choices... We all push at the boundaries of other people's lives, sometimes breaking right through the bubble that separates us, without us even knowing it."

Again and again, Gray's characters unwittingly breach boundaries, but these breaches are a calculated and deliberate trope through which Gray manipulates her story and her audience with masterful ease.

"The Anatomist's Dream" is a story of catastrophe, of difference, and of growth. Through Philburt's journey, he learns how to embrace difference, recognizing not only that "most of us will tolerate a condition we are suffering until we understand it can be otherwise", but also that what makes us unique may be what makes us strong.

"It's a mistake to believe that the small things surrounding you do not matter a whit, and a bigger mistake to believe that if you withdraw yourself from the world then the world will go on as if you've never been; every action every person takes has meaning, reverberation and consequence, whether or not they understand it at the time those actions are taken."

Philbert, along with the reader, is urged to consider the impact of small lives and small actions. I expect Clio Gray's action, and the lives she has created in "The Anatomist's Dream", to cause ripples in the literary world for years to come.

[David Crosby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting book, at times a hard read, at other times a pleasure. It flowed well through an indeterminate time of German revolution. I found it to be a coming-of-age story in an age when a disability was a natural curiosity and employment within similar peer communities was the norm. The time was a brutal one politically and our main character's travel through it was a hard one. I would have liked to seen our character's progression to adulthood, especially as references to him reaching it are made occasionally. A sequel? Anyway, recommended.

I received a copy of this book for free through Goodreads Giveaways.

[Linda Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a long narrative in the tradition of a fireside yarn. There is very little dialogue and the plot moves happily along through incredible descriptive passages that take the reader into a Breughel-like landscape centred around a travelling fair and its more or less unusual acts. The characters are all outsiders for one reason or another and the locals come to the fair to gawp. The main character who has a deformity on his head, Philbert, is brought to a famous scientist who wishes to examine him, they are caught up in political uprisings which become violent and the story plays out to a very bloody climax. You feel as though you are in magical realism territory but all of the physical deformities are accurate and there is nothing that is of another world.
Long-listed for the 2016 Bailey Prize, I give it a 4 rather than a 5 because I think dialogue helps characters interact more successfully.

[S.P. Moss · Rating 2 out of 5]

There seems to have been a spate of books published in the last couple of years set in freak shows and travelling circuses. Having enjoyed books like Angela Carter's 'Nights at the Circus' and Robertson Davies' 'The Deptford Trilogy' in the past, I thought I would try 'The Anatomist's Dream.'

It is completely a matter of taste, but I found this novel heavy-going and couldn't really connect to it. The setting is well-drawn and I admired many of the evocative descriptive passages, even though many of these carry on for a page or so without a break. For example, describing Otto Stellmacher, the wheelwright: '... huge and red with work, arms bulging like beer kegs, hard as a cooper's bands ...'

But when it comes to characters, there just seemed to be too many of them - more and more introduced in the last few pages - and all either twee and fey, or grotesque. The author seems to revel in recounting gruesome or unappetising things she's read of elsewhere, without these having any real connection to the story in hand.

The irritation this caused meant that I started finding nit-picks that I could have otherwise let be: misuse of German e.g. 'Helge' is a male name - the female version is 'Helga', or mention of 'overproduction of thyroxin' in a story supposedly set in the 1840s.

Despite this, I did finish the book and overall liked the way the author had taken the theme of the passage from childhood to youth from the point of view of an unusual character. I just wished that the way there hadn't been quite so over-spiced and stodgy.

[Praveen Mathew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book has it good times and bad times when it comes to the writing. However, once you get past the 100 page mark, you'll settle into the rhythm.

The story is lovely in a way, and not too close to the common cliche, something unique in most cases.
It alway promises about something that is about to happen, but then nothing happens, but you don't think about it because you think something else is going to happen.

In all, a book that I may not remember down the road, but still happy to have read for pleasant reading.

[Sylvia · Rating 3 out of 5]

a very dense but well-written magic realism tour de force that had me very interested but then sort of petered out with a moral that didn't really satisfy. great writing. not necessarily a great story, in my view.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me it was a delight! Happiness, sadness, anger, joy - all here for you to savour. Just get it.

[Shelley · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Anatomist's Dream tells the tale of Philbert, a boy born in 1840's Germany, with a disfiguring growth on the back of his head, who goes into the world with only a pig for company. This book held so much promise for me and I particularly enjoyed the beginning. The beautiful description of pregnancy was a particular highlight- 'she listened with joy for the uterine souffles and the double pulse', made more striking by the dark disappointment the mother feels for her imperfect child at birth. Sadly, the emotional complexity and promise of the book were lost as an increasing cast of underdeveloped characters emerged.

The books is set in the context of the German Revolution in 1848. An interesting period of history that is not clearly defined in the story. The sense of foreboding that is used as a way to round up chapters lost its power through overuse and soon became tedious. When the horrors that had been so continuously forewarned finally arrived, the impact was severely weakened. Whilst there are some beautiful descriptions, the convoluted sentence structures make for a harder read and stopped me from getting lost in the imagery.

Another element that caused my general disengagement with the story is the jarring shift in Philbert's personality towards the end of the book. Whilst the plot explains the change through the violence inflicted on him and the general unfairness of the world he belongs to, there is little reflection as the story progresses. Therefore, it doesn't feel like a gradual change in psyche, but an abrupt shift swiftly added as the story reaches its conclusion. I really struggled with this book and wish I had more empathy for the characters, though I did like the pig leading an impossibly charmed life. Good for that pig.

[Michael Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has taken me a while to read which is symptomatic of the occasional lack of engagement with the story that plagued me throughout. The story of Philbert, the boy with the taupe-a disfigurement of the head- and his adventures in the political unrest of the disunited Germany of the 1840s with a pig and a travelling fair certainly began promisingly with the moving account of his early rejection by his mother and his well intentioned but fairly useless father, but flagged somewhat in the middle with a rather overly lengthy section involving a complicated cast of characters with lengthy Germanic names such as Schnurrhenker and Hansnarrwurst, only to perk up later with a somewhat brutal massacre at a castle in Schleswig-Holstein. Had I only read the first and last thirds I would have given this 4 stars, but had I not read the middle third I would have had no idea who was massacring who and why, so overall I'm glad I stuck with it despite a bit of stodge around the midsection. What I would say is that it's definitely a bit different and perhaps the problem I had with parts of it were of my making not the author's.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Anatomist's Dream is set in 19th Century Germany, a travelling fair/circus group of misfits and outcasts, most with some kind of disability are brought together as a family unit. This story is melancholic, beautiful and cruel. The title refers to the main characters 'oddity' of a large taupe on his head, he is something to be observed and experimented on.

Although this doesn't go the way you are expecting, there are no cruel doctors whisking him off to hurt him. Many people in fact are kind to this boy and try to help him. It is the world itself that is cruel, the changing politics, the harsh winters and the continuing need to scrape by when living in poverty.

The descriptions are eloquent and there were times when this book made me cry, but there is enough foreshadowing that horrible things are rarely a surprise, by the time I got to the event, I was usually expecting something bad to happen. This book took me a long time to read, but it isn't a book to devour in one sitting, it should be savoured and enjoyed.

[SALLY WHITE · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Goodreads for sending me this book. It follows the life of Philbert and his companion Kwert. Philbert has a taupe, which is a disfiguration of his skull. His early years are very difficult and the book follows these problems and difficulties. I really enjoyed this book. Philbert is a likeable character and you want to know what happens to him. It is not an easy read; the place names and characters names need concentrating on, but the more I got into the book, the more I enjoyed it. It is very descriptive and you can really visualize the scene you are reading about. It is a very dark book in places, but other parts made me smile. The relationship between Philbert and his pig is very touching. I would recommend this book.

[Val · Rating 2 out of 5]

Setting this story in mid-nineteenth century 'Germany' at a time when pro-democracy and unification movements were sweeping across Europe appealed to me. Unfortunately the thinness of the characters and writing style did not.
It is the story of a boy with a 'taupe' (an abnormally large mole) who travels around German-speaking Europe, initially with a fair or freak show, and meets medical practitioners of the time. People have names and bodily anomalies or showman's abilities, but little else.
I think the constant foreshadowing is intended to replicate the style of serialised novels of the nineteenth century, unfortunately not those which are now considered classics.

[Vicky Reynolds · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all I need too say a big thank you for my copy of this book which I was sent via goodreads first reads. I enjoyed this book as I have had a fascination with the old world travelling fairs! The book really keeps you on your toes with a lot of twists and turns and very very unexpected outcomes at times! Thank you again

[Chimene Bateman · Rating 3 out of 5]

With this book I finally finished reading the 2016 Bailey's longlist! The writer is clearly gifted; this historical novel is original and packed with convincing detail. I'm not exactly sure why I found it so hard to follow the twists and turns of plot, but the denseness of the writing certainly had something to do with it. Ultimately this was a novel I admired rather than loved.

[A. Khare · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads like a fable. Great language. The characters were uninteresting.

[pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Marianne Eide · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fant denne på Women's prize for fiction longlist.

Hadde håpet den var litt mere John Irving-aktig. Spennende historie men flatt skrevet.

[Diana Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of this book or the author -- it popped up in my Library's "Books recommended for you". And, what a surprise! A great read. Highly recommend it.