The Law of White Spaces

by Giorgio Pressburger

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.

Genres: Fiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Giorgio Pressburger– narratore, autore e regista teatrale, saggista – è nato a Budapest nel 1937. Si è rifugiato in Italia nel 1956, dopo l’invasione sovietica dell’Ungheria. Tra le sue opere: Storie dell’Ottavo Distretto (Marietti 1986, poi Einaudi) e L’elefante verde (Marietti 1988, poi Einaudi), scritti con il fratello Nicola; La legge degli spazi bianchi (Marietti 1989, poi Bur), La neve e la colpa (Einaudi 1998, Premio Viareggio), Nel regno oscuro (Bompiani 2008), Storia umana e inumana (Bompiani 2013). Per Marsilio ha pubblicato Racconti triestini (2015) e Don Ponzio Capodoglio (2017).

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann]

As Goodreads says so little about this novel I provide a more satisfactory precise via Google books:

"Dr. Abraham Fleischmann cannot remember the name of his best friend, and is beginning to lose his medical vocabulary. Despite months of memory training, he now finds himself at the graveside of his brother, unable to remember the prayer for the dead. Vera is a mute sixteen-year-old whose growth and development are so stunted that she resembles a six-year-old. When she enters into a deranged and destructive relationship with an army doctor, she haltingly and occasionally wants to address him in the voice of a teenager. Over a period of twenty years three brothers contract different illnesses with identical symptoms. When two brothers die, the third is struck by mortal fear. The Law of White Spaces holds a bizarre, nearly gothic fascination. It is a powerful testament to one character's declaration: "Everything is written in the white spaces between one letter and the next. The rest doesn't count"."

[Simon Slidders · Rating 2 out of 5]

The blurb compares this book to Oliver Sacks Awakenings, which it is really nothing like. I was therefore confused as to whether this was intended to be some sort of faction or dramatised medical history. It was only after I had finished it that I found it had been nominated for a foreign fiction prize. , even though each story cites its medical sources, and indeed the main protagonist of the first story was a famous physician. The stories are told quite clinically in what I have come to describe as a detached European style. Most of the stories certainly leave an impression - of the impossibility of really understanding illness and how we react to it, but I was left slightly bewildered in that the mystery of the stories was hidden in the white spaces between the words.

[Janice · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fiction that reads like nonfiction. Five case studies of Drs. or very learned men and their downfalls. They seems to have some sort of brain disfunction or, at least, that's what the stories try to convey. But I think that any man or every person could have an obsession or suffer from alzheimer's. It doesn't have to be a doctor or a man even.

[Sofia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible. The stories were almost unreadable considering their lack of focus or purpose. And the way they supposedly intertwine? Well, I couldn't tell ya. Save yourself the time and energy by skipping this one.