Review
'Mr Abse is a real writer' Sir John Betjeman
Product Description
The story of Dr Robert Simmonds's disastrous infatuation with one of his patients, the young, unhappily married Yvonne Bloomberg, takes place during the post-war utilitarian days of the 1950s. When Yvonne presents her doctor with a Swedish novel about a certain Dr Glas, Robert Simmonds immediately recognises their similarity. 'I Dr. Simmonds' he writes in his diary 'acknowledge such an affinity with you. I understand your loneliness, your non-physical attachment to a woman, a woman who is innocent - and your belief in purity of action, however risky. I live here in 1950, you in a novel published in 1905. And yet you think my thoughts, speak words I could utter, accomplish deeds I might emulate.' The trouble is that the fictional Dr Glas deliberately murders the husband of the one he loved. In this spell-binding novel, Dannie Abse draws on his medical background to create a compelling narrative in which motives and action all come into question.
From the Publisher
Long listed for the Booker Prize 2002.
Set in Swiss Cottage in the 1950s, The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr Glas is a carefully crafted exploration of love, infatuation and deceit. Dr Robert Simmonds, unmarried and dissatisfied, finds an object for his repressed desires in a glamorous young woman, Yvonne Bloomberg, the wife of one of his patients. Her husband, a refugee from Nazi Germany represents for Simmonds many things he finds disturbing about the post-war world and soon he comes to find their marriage repugnant and emblematic of many of his deeply held prejudices. Yvonne presents Simmonds with a novel Doctor Glas, by Hjalmar Söderberg, the story of a doctor’s relationship with a patient and their collusion to murder her ageing husband and free her from her unhappy marriage. Simmonds soon finds that his love for Yvonne and distaste for Bloomberg has found a literary mirror in the novel. Convinced that he must rescue Yvonne from an abusive relationship, he has to face a dilemma that will test the nature of his moral and medical character. Deeply evocative of the post-war years, Dannie Abse weaves an intricate literary conceit with a story of perverted love exploring the nature of prejudice, truth and morality.
About the Author
One of Britain's most widely read and admired poets Dannie Abse has now retired from medical practice and currently broadcasts and reads his works widely in Europe and North America. Abse is the author of many books of poems, several works of fiction and an acclaimed autobiography, Goodbye Twentieth Century. He received an Hon. D. Litt. from the University of Wales in 1993.
