The Man Who Walked Away

Author(s): Maud Casey

Fiction.

In a trance-like state, Albert walks--from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia--all over Europe. When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he's left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images.Loosely based on the case history of Albert Dadas, a psychiatric patient in the hospital of St. Andre in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, "The Man Who Walked""Away" imagines Albert's wanderings and the anguish that caused him to seek treatment with a doctor who would create a diagnosis for him, a narrative for his pain. In a time when mental health diagnosis is still as much art as science, Maud Casey takes us back to its tentative beginnings and offers us an intimate relationship between one doctor and his patient as, together, they attempt to reassemble a lost life. Through Albert she gives us a portrait of a man untethered from place and time who, in spite of himself, kept setting out, again and again, in search of wonder and astonishment.


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"Unconventional and engaging . . . Our need for stories, our relationship with time, the inevitability of loss, and our startling endurance all resonate through her beautifully crafted interweaving of image and observation, fairy tale and fact." - "Publishers Weekly," starred review"Lyrical in its style and fascinating in its psychology, Casey's narrative provokes a host of intriguing questions." - "Kirkus Reviews," starred review"Maud Casey's "The Man Who Walked Away" is a haunting, deeply empathetic, and rigorously intelligent novel. It is also a seamless marvel of construction and language. "The Man Who Walked Away" cast a spell from which I never wished to wake." --Alice Sebold, author of "The Lovely Bones "and "The Almost Moon""Pay attention, this lovely novel urges. As Maud Casey spins this mysteriously urgent tale of patient and doctor entwining, her quicksilver prose yields one astonishing image after another: each moment fleetingly beautiful, each character here--here!--and nowhere else. As this novel is like nothing else. Reading it is a singularly moving experience." --Andrea Barrett, author of "Ship Fever" and "Archangel""Only a writer as brilliant as Maud Casey could write a novel as understated, urgent, and mysterious as "The Man Who Walked Away." In her deft and deeply empathetic hands, this book about dark things--terror, fragility, memory, and illness--shimmers with a rare and wondrous beauty." --Lauren Groff, author of "Arcadia""""Maud Casey's ensorcelling marvel of a novel, "The Man Who Walked Away," starts with a wind, the poet's element, that blows over, through and past all, transporting us, as great art will, to the wonderment of being in the world, or in Albert's case, not in the world. Only in "the vase" of the asylum, with its benign Director and staff, can Albert rest, find love (he hopes) and a history. Casey's novel, with its accounts of the asylum's correctives to the anguish of erasure--walks in nature and 'the song of Nurse Anne's voi

Maud Casey is the author of two novels, "The Shape of Things to Come," a "New York Times" Notable, and "Genealogy," and a collection of stories, "Drastic." She is the recipient of the Calvino Prize and has received fellowships from the Fundacion Valparaiso, Hawthornden International Writers Retreat, Chateau de Lavigny, and the Passa Porta residency at Villa Hellebosch. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at the University of Maryland and in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Warren Wilson.

General Fields

  • : 9781620403112
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : March 2014
  • : United States
  • : March 2014
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Maud Casey
  • : Hardback
  • : 240