‘Bloodletting’ no miracle
[This is a quick impression of the first 100 pages, not a review.]
Bloodletting & Miracle Cures by Vincent Lam won Canada’s Giller Prize and has a nice blurb by Margaret Atwood. But it’s actually a poor man’s ER, medical drama written in simplistic, down-at-the-heels prose. One interesting bit concerns cadaver dissection, when female med student Ming wants to cut through a tattoo:
‘You should respect a man’s symbols,’ said Sri. ‘My mother taught me that…’
‘Don’t your people burn the corpses anyhow?’ said Ming, grabbing the tattooed arm…
‘He’s not my people… I’m not afraid of you…’
And later, the unkindest cut:
Men are odd about penises… they secretly believe them to be very important, perhaps sacred. So we got to the penis on our cadaver, and the men wanted to skip it. ‘We’ll look at the book,’ they said. ‘No way,’ I said… Corpus spongiosum, all that jazz… I saw that it was this one guy’s turn to dissect, and there was no way that this man was going to cut up a penis…
It was Ming’s turn to cut, and she went right through it with one long arc of the scalpel… ‘Someone want the testicles?’ Both Chen and Sri declined politely, and so Ming did the rest of that day’s dissection — producing a fine display of the epididymis and the spermatic ducts.
That’s the book’s way of showing Ming is a man-eater. The rest of the symbolism is similarly heavy-handed. A cadaver is tattooed with the number of the Biblical passage about resurrection:
‘Why do you think Murphy chose Mark 16… Is that the end of the Jesus story?’
‘I guess a pilot would have figured there wouldn’t be a body left for anyone…’
‘He was wrong,’ Sri said, bowing his head… ‘He’s here for us.’
The pilot part is clever, the rest feels the need to hammer in the metaphor. The book’s opening story continues in that vein with an airless story of grinder love, geek flirting over highlighters and Krebs cycles. These linked stories might float your boat if you work in medicine or identify with the hopeless nerd whom John Cho brushed off in Harold and Kumar.
on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008, 9:17 pm in Fiction, Health › 
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Huh, that’s an interesting scene, the man eater one, but, it doesn’t ring true for me. I am permanently irritated by contempo fiction that all reads like something out of some precocious and self-absorbed MFA’s scribbled notebook/laptop/whatever. Dull people make dull fiction. I should know. I love Penelope Lively and Anita Brookner (seriously, I do love, both, and I’m ashamed of myself for making fun just because this is a more ‘with it’ blog, book-wise).
I don’t remember anyone having any particular problem with that sort of dissection, or, rather, the whole cadaver thing is strange and no guy was specifically worried about dissecting male genitalia. The only time I saw any guy rattled was during the gynecologic exams on the practice (live) patients. Naturally.
What does get published these days? Are the themes all laid out, neatly, in classes on gender, class, what have you, during said authors time at said institution of higher learning? Again, dullsville. Is this why people write magical realism? To make up for the dullness?
dude md. [i’m not sure what’s an mfa ] but Lam is quite personable . tho’ interestingly he took up medicine only because he thought it would help him become a writer. :-)
khoofia - not a dude, but, ignore me. I’m old and cranky. I’m sure Lam is very nice, a good writer, deserving of awards, but, I’m bored with much of the prize winning fiction of today. It just doesn’t speak to me. Dunno why. Must speak to someone, though, or, they wouldn’t be buying it. So, it doesn’t mean anything that I don’t like it. I just don’t.
*The thought that someone would go to medical school to become a better fiction writer fills me with a very strange emotion. I find it very odd, actually. There is something distinctly bizarre about that. Good grief. I mean, lots of people go into medicine for terrible reasons and end up being good doctors, but, I really find that utterly bizarre. Oddly enough, I bet it would make a good plot for some contempo lit nove. MFA = some kind of masters that commenters in blogs I read make fun of. The blogs I read tend to be filled with literary and entertainment world flunkies, so, I expect there is a lot of jealousy :)
Ha Ha. I just thought of something. Maybe he really took up medicine because his parent’s wanted him, too, so he thought ‘okay, I want to be a writer and I will go to medical school to please my parents and make that experience the basis for my writing. Two birds with one stone, and all that. Ha ha. I’m mean and jealous! He is smart!
I am way too in love with commas these days…….
*I rarely write about medicine, but, I rarely write anything. Who am I kidding? I don’t write and will never really ‘write’. It’s just an affectation. I need hobbies - perhaps crafting?
Still, it’s too, sacred, for me. I feel like I’d be pimping something. That’s wrong, I know, but, that’s how I feel.
oh. i gnu that. i just like saying dude, dude. not to take anything from your gender - but i thot this is inoffensive usage.
how about slacking off for a while.
That said… i think you’re being too harsh on yoreself. i’m pretty sure any doc’s casebook is more interesting than anything a magical realist can drum up. [which is why i think not too highly of the salamander gimmicks - though i relate to the angst under the fluff. my preference is bare prose, an experience closer to bleached bone than a featherduster]. incidentally Pohl made the same comment in regard to his input/collaboration on Arthur C Clarke’s last novel - that today’s scifi writers focus on fantasy as opposed to science that is fiction now but may become real. Hence, the fiction tht Clarke and Pohl have produced over their careers is not really just good reading, it’s very cerebral and actually a window in the future - as opposed to some high school dropout riffing about about big bosomed martians with ridged skulls and passing it off as scifi. in disclosure- the mum’s a doc - and the kind of stories she has are REALLY intense and very colorful. Like the time when she had a client drink a couple of bottles of beer until he peed out a rock the size of a walnut, or the time when (in india) she was taken by some Daku’s to take care of some guy who had been shot in an encounter. And then she’s got a whack sense of humor - about piles and tough raspy boogers etc. :-)
Yikes, khoofia, I was kind of joking :) I went a little nutso on this post. I do that from time to time. I’m just playing around in the comments section, is what I am doing. I think I would hate, hate, hate to write up a book proposal, get an agent, all that jazz. It sounds really horrible. My life, as it is - pretty nice.
I agree with you. I like writing that’s more pointed, more immediate, more vibrant. Maybe manish’s excerpts just don’t do the book justice. I’ve been reading Booker stuff and other prize winners for years. I think I’m just over it. I’m in a bit of a book crisis. I don’t know what I want to read anymore. I need new stuff. Maybe poetry. Or movie blogs. Anything different, is all.
Apropos.