my mind on books

Garcia’s Heart, a first novel by neurologist Liam Durcan, deals with issues of medical ethics, memory, and the difficulty of knowing another person’s mind and heart. The narrator is a neurologist attending the war crimes trial of his former mentor, Hernan García. The accused refuses to speak, thus leaving it up to the narrator to sift through his own memories, trying to reconcile his image of the man who had inspired him to study medicine with the actions attributed to him. In the process, the narrator also examines his own life and the choices that led him to apply neuroscience to market research on behalf of a large corporation.

García is a cardiologist and the narrator is a neurologist, so there is some heart vs brain contrast between the two characters; plus the physical heart plays a pivotal role in the plot, making this an appropriate selection for the
“Book A Month Challenge” theme “the heart.”

I saw that the February theme for the Book a Month Challenge is the heart (romance, love, courage, the physical heart, etc.)

This might be an excuse — or better an occasion — to read Garcia’s Heart, which I’d noted earlier as an example of ‘neurofiction.’

Thanks to LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program, I received an advance copy of The Age of Shiva: A Novel by Manil Suri, which is due to be published in Feb 2008, according to Amazon. Since it is the second volume of a trilogy, I re-read the first book, The Death of Vishnu, while waiting for ‘The Age of Shiva’ to arrive.

Now I’ve read both novels, and find that I much preferred ‘Vishnu’ to ‘Shiva.’

‘The Age of Shiva’ is told from the first-person perspective of one character, Meera, addressed to her son, Ashvin. Set against a background of Indian politics and history during the early years of independence, much of the story concerns the intense relationship between Meera and her child. Meera’s father is a progressive who urges his daughters to become educated and have careers. Paradoxically, Meera experiences this as paternal interference; an early marriage seems to be her way of rebelling against her father’s wishes. Jealousy of her older sister also plays a role, so that much of Meera’s life seems to be based on reactions to her relatives and other people around her. Echoes of the mythological figures of Shiva, Parvati, and their son Ganesha are also woven in.

In ‘Death of Vishnu,’ among many stories involving the residents of one apartment house, there is a compelling treatment of three characters who exemplify differing concepts of transcendence. The title character, Vishnu, at the lowest level, undergoes death and rebirth, while an upstairs neighbor, Mr. Jalal, takes a more intellectual approach. On the top level, Mr. Taneja experiences a gradual withdrawal from the world after his wife’s early death. His story seemed to me to be a beautiful depiction of a very natural kind of spiritual development, in contrast to Mr. Jalal’s deliberate efforts.

Author’s website

Important Books on the Brain: An Annotated Bibliography of Fiction and Non-Fiction

“The following descriptions focus on widely praised books about the brain, both scientific and literary. The selections are excerpted from articles in Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science.”

A few quick links …

1. Self-deception bibliography – part of the “Consciousness in the Natural World Project” from the University of Stirling. The bibliography & website in general don’t seem to have been updated for a few years but the bibliography has separate sections for articles and books, many with abstracts.

2. The introduction to ‘How to Read a Novel’ by John Sutherland is online at the Guardian, in which Sutherland touches on the interesting question “why we need so much narrative in our lives” and suggests that the rise of the novel in the 18th century “revolutionised” human consciousness….

3. For those who feel a need for narrative in the form of a “visionary thriller,” Discipline: A Novel by Paco Ahlgren sounds intriguing and has garnered lots of 5-star customer reviews at Amazon. (interview, website)