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The sensational #1 bestseller from Argentina comes to America with a dash of period detail and a twist of eroticism -- and intoxicating blend that is sure to be the toast of the literary season.Published to critical acclaim in his native Argentina, Federico Andahazi's "The Anatomist" instantly transports readers to Venice in the sixteenth century. For it is in that place and time that the anatomist, Mateo Colon, is on the verge of making a most earthshaking discovery: the center of the female's erotic universe. Colon has always thought of himself as a man of science and reason in all age of stubborn superstition. But even he is tempted to alchemy when he faces the age-old problem that could defeat the greatest of male minds: how to make a woman deeply, deliciously happy.When an encounter with a beautiful, ailing patient leads to his astonishing discovery, Colon realizes that this "sweet newly found land" is indeed the key to the intimate mystery of feminine pleasure. His sudden, skillfulknowledge wins him the attention of Mona Sophia, the loveliest prostitute in all of Venice... and of the authorities, who soon bring the wrath of the Inquisition upon his head.Calling to mind the lush historical scope of Umberto Eco and the earthy wit and sensuality of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "The Anatomist" is now available in America. In prose as delicate and flowing as a satin slip, Federico Andahazi takes readers on a provocative journey and reminds them of the territory that can never be completely conquered, whose exploration and discovery provide an endlessly renewable delight.… (more)
User reviews
The book is set in 16th century Renaissance Italy where one Mateo Colombo, renowned anatomist and doctor, is put on trial by the Inquisition for a book he has written in which he describes his discovery of the clitoris (from the Greek "tickling"), or Amor Veneris, as he calls it. His initial discovery came in his treatment of a wealthy and beautiful widow, Ines, who seemed to be dying of depression and lassitude, but was wonderfully revived by the good doctor's manual manipulation of her engorged clitoris. The trial is fixed, and the good doctor will be burned at the stake, but he is saved by a summons to attend to the ailing Pope, and after he cures the pontiff, the world is at his feet, at least until the Pope dies, and Colombo finds that he bet on the wrong horse in terms of a successor and he has to flee Rome. But he does so happily, because he wants to return to his one great love, the fabulously beautiful prostitute, Mona Sofia whom he had only painted in the nude before, but whom he thinks will now love him because he has discovered, and can share with her, the soruce of women's love. Alas, he finds her ravaged as, "never...had he witnessed a case of syphilis so advanced". And Mona, a wonderful character, has the last word as the doctor professes his love to her and strokes her ravaged body when with her last breath she uses the same line she used when he painted her for days and days in row while professing his undying love and desire to take her away: "Your time is up."
This scant, and incomplete, summary does not to do justice to good writing in an interesting novel that conjures wonderfully the world of the 16th century and is, at the same time, a disquisition on the role and position of women in that society, the meaning of the soul and how it differs between men and women, the state of scientific knowledge and nature of scientific inquiry and its collision with the single most powerful force in society, the Church, which never took kindly to the perceived loss of any authority, or any weakening of the interpretation of faith that was, of course, its sole privilege. Colombo's philosophical, metaphysical defence during his trial is a wonderful.
Perhaps not to everyone's taste as a novel, but one that I enjoyed and would recommend.
The depositions presented during the trial to show the evil and demonic nature of the good doctor are interesting for their links to the Salem witchhunt trials and the report by the Special Prosecutor on Clinton's perjury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. John Updike made the latter connection in an article I read recently, where he noted that the testimony in the Salem trials served as a sort of sanctioned voyeurism as women would talk about being possessed by the devil or his minions in some considerable detail, certainly much more crudely and explicitly than would ever be allowed in the press or literature of that day. Similarly, in Updike's view, the report of the Special Prosecutor uses its formal and legal status to go well beyond what is necessary and acceptable, even in today's mainstream press; the fact of the affair and the subsequent perjury seem clear: do we really need the details of how and when Monica serviced the President and what exactly he did with his cigar? So, in the 16th century, testimony to the effect that the doctor:
...forced her to open legs, whereupon he inserted a demon inside her. The aforementioned declares that in the midst of her ecstasy, she was unable to tear herself free because the demon inside her gave her more pleasure than she had ever felt before...
would have been pretty racy stuff for the judges and witnesses! Plus ca change....