The Sensualist: An Illustrated Novel

by Barbara Hodgson

Overview

A scholar’s search for her husband unfolds a hallucinatory tale of vengeance in a mystery illustrated by the artist and author of The Tattooed Map.

When her journalist husband suddenly goes missing, art historian Helen Martin travels to Vienna to find him. But soon after her arrival, she finds herself entering a strange world of twilight, dream logic, and danger. Traveling by train with a mysterious box of wonders, Helen’s search for her husband takes her headlong into a tense mystery with provocative links to the past.

The clues Helen must piece together—jewels, notes, ancient anatomy texts—are all presented to the reader in Barbara Hodgson’s illustrations. Both a complex thriller and an investigation of the senses, The Sensualist explores the limitations of looking and the boundless power of seeing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781452116877
Publisher:	Chronicle Books
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	286
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Barbara Hodgson is a Vancouver-based writer, photographer, and designer. Her illustrated novels include The Tattooed Map, The Sensualist, and Hippolyte's Island.

Editorial Reviews

...[A] quirky and intense novel, full of weird events and oddball characters... -- The New York Times Book Review

Erik Burns

Obvious echoes of Kafka and subtler whiffs of William Gaddis' The Recognitions and Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling resound throughout this tantalizing metaphysical mystery, the second illustrated novel from the Canadian artist, photographer, and author of The Tattooed Map. The protagonist and narrator, Helen Martin, is an art historian who specializes in "medical illustration" and who suffers harrowing physical and emotional dislocations while traveling across Europe in search, at first, of her errant husband Martin Evans, a freelance journalist who's scarcely part of her life any more. On a train to Vienna, Helen meets the grotesque, menacing Rosa Kovslosky and almost immediately deduces that the older woman is somehow enacting a succubus-like exchange of body parts with her (while blandly reassuring the dumbfounded Helen that "We all lose parts of ourselves from time to time"). The contents of a mysterious box left in her keeping, a series of encounters with shady (when not positively demonic) reality instructors and accomplices, and her (probably correct) inference that Martin had been investigating art forgeries all lead her to Budapest and Munich, among other locales—and to the inconclusive conclusion that the machinations of "a wicked man who would do anything to turn the world of art on its ear" have exposed her to the influences of people who reach from beyond the grave to set old wrongs right and exact vengeance. If all this sounds oppressive, it isn't—because Hodgson writes crisp, resonant, brainy sentences and filters a wealth of information through the consciousness of a heroine both intelligent and self-deprecating enough torealize she's a peculiarly vulnerable Western Alice adrift in an amusingly sophisticated and corrupt old European Wonderland. Further interest is provided by an intricate puzzle involving 16th-century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius and by a plethora of gorgeously spooky anatomical illustrations. First-rate literate entertainment—and one of the year's most replete and unusual fictions.

Kirkus Reviews