The Book of Madness and Cures

Reading the book cover, I learned I would be fol­lowing in the foot­steps of Gabriella Mondini, and I assumed I would be tracing a map of Renais­sance Europe. The main char­acter of The Book of Madness and Cures is a sixteenth-​​century Venetian woman who has been trained as a physician by her father, a well-​​respected doctor of his time. Her father has dis­ap­peared, and the novel’s search for him takes Gabriella on a journey that extends from Venice to Padua, from Germany to Holland, from Edinburg to Spain, from Morocco through the deserts of northern Africa.

Quickly, I dis­covered that we were on no ordinary set of travels. Instead, we were lost and found in a world of magical realism, a land of pic­torial and philo­sophical touch­stones where Gabriella’s expe­ri­ences and her imag­inings were our alter­nating guides. Ordi­narily I’m not a fan of magical realism, but this story per­fectly cap­tures the conundrum of what is real and what is not real and what is more than real, both here on earth and in our minds. I give a lot of credit to Regina O’Melveny’s exquisite prose, which firmly grounds the nar­rative in the physical world and at the same times soars poet­i­cally overhead. “In the sky near Cas­siopeia, shooting stars fell like broken lances one after another, piercing the air with stubs of light, repeated on the lake’s surface.” Later, “A scat­tered snowfall flew here and there, uneven white flakes like bits of charred paper. Night didn’t fall—rather day leached from the air and dark caulked the spaces left behind.”

Cities, such as “Tangier in full view looking like the closed fist of a king, encrusted with dusky sap­phires,” metaphor­i­cally come to life. Animals are bril­liantly ren­dered, dol­phins “gleaming like freshly pol­ished pewter as they leapt in and out of the sea, sewing sky to water.” People are described in words that could be used by an artist, as Gabriella ten­derly observes her neu­rotic mother, her two loyal servant-​​companions, the many elderly doctors and sci­en­tists she meets along the way, the virile would-​​be suitors she finds most attractive. Indeed, the author cites several paintings that inspired her as she wrote the book. Describing one, Albrecht Durer’s ‘Melan­cholia,’ O’Melveny believes the “womanly angel “ has been “a muse for me, both winged and earth­bound, delin­eating the journey for my characters.”

If I try to give words to that journey, I will be doing the novel a dis­service, for its enchantment and allure res­onate within the pages them­selves. As com­pelling as the travels are the letters from Gabriella’s father that are inter­laced throughout the nar­rative, for they offer a quite dif­ferent point of view. Near lunacy overlaid on pro­found sanity, I’d say. A further dimension comes with the excerpts drawn from the tax­onomy of dis­eases, madness, and cures that the two Dot­tores Mondini were com­piling together. Here is a window on Renais­sance alchemy, viewed through a tran­scen­dental filter: ‘The Malady of Mirrors,’ ‘The Plague of Black Tears,’ ‘An invisible worm that con­sumes the heart.’

I won’t give away the ending of this won­derful story, but it too is a truth-​​telling fantasy of duties and dreams. Gabriella comes full circle, her days pulsing with life and fading ephemerally into the night. “The moonless blue-​​black sky hummed with stars that cast their silver through the shadowy palm tree, upon our shoulders, the courtyard, and across the vast dark earth.” Closing the pages of The Book of Madness and Cures, I hated to let her go. –AR