An Imperfect Lens

by Anne Roiphe

Book Overview

Acclaimed author Anne Roiphe evokes the sights and sounds of 1880s Alexandria, Egypt, a bustling center of trade and travel. From teeming docks to overflowing market stalls, from grand homes to grimy... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400082129
• ISBN13: 9781400082124
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Broadway Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Superb novel, direct to the soul

"If the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?" Walt Whitman wrote, in what could be the epigraph to this wonderful novel of science and love. Anne Roiphe shows that the men seeking to save the human body from the ravages of disease are modern knights. As a girl, her heroine dreams of a poet; as a woman, she discovers love with a scientist. Every sentence of the story is poetry - but sharper poetry than Lawrence Durell's prose about the same city, Alexandria. When you start reading, be ready not to stop till the last word.

"This is the world we live in. We share it with cholera."

An Imperfect Lens is atmospheric tale set in Alexandra, Egypt in 1883; the main character a lethal disease, cholera: ''unseen pulsing crescent moonshapes," that are steadily breeding in the exposed sewage, killing the city's poor, gradually finding its way into the houses of the rich. Feeding in the stomachs of the innocent, death is almost instantaneous - a sharp pain in the stomach, lips tinged with blue, a loss of bowel control, the body shriveled, turned grey like slate. Paranoia is rife; the wealthy see it as a sign of the city's drinking and lack of morality, the less fortunate see it as a mark of God's will, a way for the rich to rid the city of an unwanted population. How is the disease transmitted? By air or bird droppings, or perhaps even food. People are instructed to always rinse their hands, and never eat unwashed food from market stalls. But the microbes continue to spread, on the edges of bed linen, on the shoes of unsuspecting servants, splashing in the city's puddles, streams and open sewers, on the surface of fruit, the edges of plates and cutlery. Three Chemists from Paris - Louis Thuilliers, Emile Roux and veterinarian Edmond Nocard - are dispatched directly from the laboratories of famous scientist Louis Pasteur to Alexandra, hoping to isolate the microbe. The sights, sounds and smells of this exotic city, immediately seduce the idealistic Louis. Almost at once, he falls for Este Malina, the daughter of the City's Jewish doctor, who is the verge of being engaged when Louis meets her at dinner at the French consulate's home. Este, bored with her life, begins to help out in the laboratory, awakening to the possibility of a career in the sciences, with Louis at her side. She hopes to marry her paramour, but her imminent engagement and Louis's humble background irrevocably stands between them. Her religion also is a barrier, with her father and his wife, considering the Jewish faith so much more than just a faith "but a cord that inevitably binds them." Louis and Este's love affair plays out against a cholera epidemic that pressingly evades the lens of the scientists and the city's authorities. The other characters are equally caught in this stew of city waste, men with their own personal demons and small enjoyments: There's Eric Fortman, an Englishman from Liverpool, a good salesman and a sturdy traveler, determined to start a new life in Alexandra as an importer and a businessman, a type of reinvented merchant prince who can slip money into the right hands at the right time. And there's Marcus, Louis's rebellious young assistant, who one night beneath the boardwalk, witnesses Masika, a hotel maid, succumb to the disease: "pools of fecal liquid gathering by her hips, the illness taking over her body like a colonial power, killing everything in its way." The lives of the main protagonists, however, are diminished in the light of author Anne Rophie's harrowing and exquisitely wrought descriptions of a city on the brin