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Half-hidden by forest and overshadowed by threatening peaks, Le Sommet has always been a sinister place. Long plagued by troubling rumors, the former abandoned sanatorium has since been renovated into a five-star minimalist hotel. A raw, beautiful, haunting, and flowing mix of diary entries, poetry, and creative non-fiction. The book chronicles the author's experience with chronic illness, pain, water, and the seemingly never-ending cycle between being unwell and (almost) well, and believed and questioned about the validity of one's disability. She includes the beautiful and the ugly. It's strange and hypnotic, but I'm into that kind of thing. I have absolutely no idea what I’ve just read in Abi Palmer’s Sanatorium. It’s part memoir, part flash fiction, part fantasy, part lucid explanation of illness and pain, part metaphor for life, frequently written with the fabulous intensity of a narrative poem and always with luminous, beautiful, and occasionally stark, prose. However Sanatorium might be defined, it is written with incredible imagination, intelligence and beauty. There’s both sadness and humour so that Sanatorium feels perfectly balanced even while the narrator herself can feel slightly unhinged.
The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse review: a new hero, plenty of
The book is in snippets, often of just a paragraph or even one sentence, and cycles through its several strands: Abi’s time in Budapest and how she captures it in an audio diary; ongoing therapy at her London flat, custom-designed for disabled tenants (except “I was the only cripple who could afford it”); the haunted house she grew up in in Surrey; and notes on plus prayers to St. Teresa of Ávila, accompanied by diagrams of a female figure in yoga poses. Sanatorium is a fascinating work – matter-of-fact, playful and sensual – that vividly conveys the reality of life with a chronic illness. It was already on my wish list, but I’m so glad that this shortlisting gave me a chance to read it. Though I haven’t read the other nominees yet, the passages below are proof that this would be a deserving Barbellion Prize winner.Water plays a big part in that her therapy consists largely of being immersed in a sulphuric bath which “smells like rotten eggs” but seems to help. When she gets home, where there is no bathtub, she obtains a large inflatable plastic tub which sits in the middle of her living room. It’s presence almost becomes a symbol for her illness in that it is always there and in the way. I reviewed this as part of the shortlist for a new UK literary award, the Barbellion Prize, which will be given annually “to an author whose work has best represented the experience of chronic illness and/or disability.”) RT @ TheMysterious: We’re making plans to head out to @ HamptonsWhodun next month, Long Island’s exciting new crime fiction festival. Se… https://t.co/ra7RPgf7Fv Mar 30, 2023, 6:13 PM
Book Review: THE SANATORIUM by Sarah Pearse - Crime by the Book Book Review: THE SANATORIUM by Sarah Pearse - Crime by the Book
I am one of the more privileged ones and still I’m screaming. God, it would be so nice just to dissolve into nothing and wash up onto a lonely beach. I felt very aware that this was a book by someone who works visually as well as word, and it felt perhaps like part of something (a something I'd like to see), a text to be chopped up and projected onto walls with photographs or installations or read out to visitors wearing headphones. It veers between dream-like sequences and down to earth realities - mould on bathtubs, especially in the inflatable she has at home, features heavily. I found the inclusion of the little figures, so typical of rehabilitation leaflets, by way of punctuation between many of the pieces effective and disturbing. She has much to say about the approach and attitudes of those who define themselves as helping professionally and shows how patients are constantly wrong-footed, not listened to and made to doubt themselves, to no good end. She includes a chilling piece which I was not surprised to learn at the end of the book comes from Phil Parker's secretive and money-raking Lightning Process, which oddly seems to appeal to medics and researchers when similar schemes are rightly derided. Conversely I kept finding images from the film A Cure for Wellness popping into my mind as I read (there are no eels this book, thank goodness) When I look at that sculpture, the folds of her marble dress, I can feel her lightness. Breathing life into stone. That is exactly what it means to float." In an ideal world that rating would be 4.5 stars, but there's no room for nuance in rating here, right? And that's actually fine, I wish Abi Palmer and this book all good things so let's go with 5. An imposing, isolated getaway spot high up in the Swiss Alps is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But Elin's taken time off from her job as a detective, so when her estranged brother, Isaac, and his fiancée, Laure, invite her to celebrate their engagement at the hotel, Elin really has no reason not to accept.
A young woman spends a month taking the waters at a thermal water-based rehabilitation facility in Budapest. On her return to London, she attempts to continue her recovery using an 80 pound inflatable blue bathtub. The tub becomes a metaphor for the intrusion of disability; a trip hazard in the middle of an unsuitable room, slowly deflating and in constant danger of falling apart.
Sanatorium: A Novel (Detective Elin Warner Series Book 1) The Sanatorium: A Novel (Detective Elin Warner Series Book 1)
I ask a nurse about the side effects listed on my medication, such as nausea and liver failure. She says that side effects only happen to people who are worried about the side effects.
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Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge. And things only get worse when they wake the next morning to find her brother's fiancée is missing. With access to the hotel cut off, the guests begin to panic.
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