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Paul Broks
INTO THE SILENT LAND
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Book review by Anthony Campbell. Copyright ? Anthony Campbell (2004).
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Broks is a neuropsychologist, but he is a clinician with leanings
towards philosophy, who has written an extended meditation on the nature
of the self. Although he has rightly been praised for his originality,
this is not to say he is breaking entirely new ground, for his book
belongs to the class of literature pioneered by Oliver Sacks; and indeed
Broks says that, while writing, he avoided reading Sacks to prevent
being unduly influenced. Like Sacks, he gives us imaginative, sometimes
almost poetic, descriptions of his clinical experiences, and his case
histories are narrated in a way that reveals his emotional involvement
with his patients.
Broks uses a variety of literary forms to convey his ideas, including
surreal short stories, in one of which, for example, a man becomes
transparent, while in another, Broks himself is subjected to a kind of
inquisition by nameless interrogators. There are literary echoes here of
Borges and Kafka. It is almost a relief to come across passages where
Broks seems to speak to you straightforwardly, in his own voice, without
literary devices interposed. In these places he reflects on the relation
between brain and mind.
Broks has a distinctive tone of voice: sensitive, sometimes humorous,
sometimes elegiac. His touch is indeed so delicate and allusive that at
times it is difficult to know quite how to read him. His final piece,
Gulls, movingly describes how he and his wife reacted to her breast
cancer, its diagnosis and treatment. It is implied that she dies, and
this is echoed in a coda with lines from Christina Rossetti's poem
'Remember' that also give the book its title. But nothing is spelled out
explicitly, and the piece manages to be simultaneously deeply personal
yet reticent - something I find characteristic of the book as a whole.
A strange book, utterly individual, and I suspect not easily forgotten
once read.
25 July 2004
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%T Into The Silent Land
%A Paul Broks
%I Atlantic Books
%C London
%D 2003
%G ISBN 1-84354-034-7
%P 246 pp
%K psychology, philosophy
%O paperback edition
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