Life Sciences
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- ¥1,700
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- ¥1,700
発行者による作品情報
“Joy Sorman’s Life Sciences takes an overtly political premise—the medical establishment’s inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women—and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?” —Lena Dunham, The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
Ninon Moise is cursed. So is her mother Esther, as was every eldest female member of her family going back to the Middle Ages. Each generation is marked by a uniquely obscure disease, illness, or ailment—one of her ancestors was patient zero in the sixteenth-century dancing plague of Strasbourg, while Esther has a degenerative eye disease. Ninon grows up comforted and fascinated by the recitation of these bizarre, inexplicable medical mysteries, forewarned that something will happen to her, yet entirely unprepared for how it will alter her life. Her own entry into this litany of maladies appears one morning in the form of an excruciating burning sensation on her skin, from her wrists to her shoulders.
Embarking on a dizzying and frustrating cycle of doctors, specialists, procedures, needles, scans, and therapists, seventeen-year-old Ninon becomes consumed by her need to receive a diagnosis and find a cure for her ailment. She seeks to break the curse and reclaim her body by any means necessary, through increasing isolation and failed treatment after failed treatment, even as her life falls apart. A provocative and empathic questioning of illness, remedy, transmission, and health, Life Sciences poignantly questions our reliance upon science, despite its limitations, to provide all the answers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French writer Sorman portrays a girl's transition to womanhood as an ancestral curse in her English-language debut, an arresting allegory described by author Catherine Lacey in an introduction as a "feminist Metamorphosis." Ninon Moise grows up in 1990s Paris with a hunger for horrific stories of her family's mysterious genetic disorder, which has saddled each of the women in her family with a variety of ailments, beginning in 1518 with "patient zero" Marie Lacaze, the family's "hero and monster." Ninon knows it's only a matter of time until the curse strikes her, too. Then, at 17, Ninon starts to feel a burning sensation on her skin and a tremendous amount of pain whenever something touches her arms. She sees a series of dermatologists, psychiatrists, and shamans in hope of finding a cure, all to no avail. Her determination to jump "out of the line of cursed, mad, degenerate women" makes her an engaging character as well as a powerful cipher of resistance to the stories she's grown up with. After Esther gives her a copy of Kafka's Metamorphosis to help her cope, Ninon decides she's "afraid of getting used to the cockroach state, to horror as a standard of existence." Readers will feel empowered by this tale of taking control of one's body.
