The Sensualist: An Illustrated Novel

The start of this book captured my attention. It begins with Helen, a loyal wife seeking her missing husband - still loyal, whether or not he's worth being loyal to. Early in her journey, she encounters some very odd people and receives a mysterious gift. A touch of the supernatural swirls around it, and around the people she encounters. The theme of the senses gets support from Helen's long experience in anatomical art. Eerie touches in the story, combined with complex collages throughout the book, set my hopes in the direction of  Nick   Bantock's  better work.Somehow, the story never builds. Elements that could have lent drama seem to fizzle. Connections between characters never tie the story together. Then, the ending just terminates the book without resolving it. The husband's absence, though ended, stays unresolved, the supernatural elements just end without explanation. The means of a bizarre murder go unexplained, even though the murder demands explanation in terms of the murderer. The writing carried me to the end, then unceremoniously dumped me.-- wiredweird

Such a mixture of both the good and evil which resides in the hearts and souls of most of us. It was mesmerizing with it's focus on ancient woodblocks which was analogous to the main character's search for her real self. While enjoyable with it's paranormal aspects, the book isn't for someone looking for a light pleasure read. The artfulness of the author is evident throughout in subject manner and writing style. It was a challenging and self enlightening reading experience!

This book is an absolute treasure and you want it in your library. The pages are wonderful and then the author takes you off your guard with this tale.

Very cool novel! I would suggest it to anyone looking for an unusual read!

Hodgson certainly doesn't beat around the bush, establishing the eerie mood of this unique novel with her opening sentence: "Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else's breasts." If that doesn't catch your attention, Helen's encounters on the train from Munich to Vienna should. A grotesque female doctor gives Helen an antique wooden box filled with medical memorabilia for her "search"; an old woman, accompanied by a young man wearing eye makeup, demands in vain that Helen change her seat, then leaves her a diamond ring; and a talking dog offers her a new pair of shoes, while his mistress plops herself down and begins to shave her legs.A combination of a fever dream and a nightmare, this strikingly illustrated novel explores the five senses and the anatomy associated with them, as Helen, a specialist in anatomical illustration, searches for her missing husband and expands her vision of life's possibilities. Martin, her husband, is a journalist who has been investigating art fraud in Europe, specifically fraud involving the woodblocks used to reproduce the anatomical studies of Vesalius in 1543. Helen's mysterious wooden box includes a Vesalius woodcut, which may provide a key to unraveling Martin's disappearance, but the contents of the box are always changing, as virtually everyone Helen meets either adds or subtracts objects. A series of new mysteries emerge, involving horrible murders and suicides among the people Helen has met.While the book is certainly intriguing in many ways, Hodgson pushes the envelope so far that I wondered if she were deliberately trying to out-weird all other contemporary authors with her plot. The "willing suspension of disbelief" ended early for me. Unlike some other readers, I did not find the book "light," or "whimsical." Rather, I found it dark and gloomy, filled with depressing visions of raw humanity. The illustrations, which are beautifully produced and amazingly clever in their fold-outs, are, nevertheless, anatomical drawings and woodcuts, so esoteric an aspect of "art history," that I found it difficult to see why the Helen (and the author) found them so intrinsically interesting. This is an amazing book--but I didn't find it a very pleasant one. Mary Whipple

The Sensualist is a very beautiful book. The illustrations are both exacting and balanced but the textual representations of the body try to mimic the pictorial and this is where the book begins to falter. The plot is rather haphazard but I didn't mind this - after all, it's a mystery.Helen Martin is searching for her husband but instead finds anatomical drawings. The focus of the novel immediately switches from the huband to the drawings, relating their history and perhaps more about the history of all anatomical illustration than the readre would care to learn. When the lesson gives way to narrative once again the writing becomes centered on the physical and tactile sensations of Helen Martin. This would be a fantastic cinematic effect but somehow just doesn't work in the novel...By the middle of the book I was reading quickly, not even looking at the drawings, just wanting to reach the resolution of the mystery and learn the outcome of Helen's search for her husband. In the end I was pretty disappointed.

This book defies conventionality and is unlike anything that I have read except "Alice in Wonderland". That makes it difficult to review. Helen is on a journey not only to find herself, but find her missing husband. The cast of characters that she encounters are not only entertaining, but pieces to the puzzle of a murder. I found myself bored at times and intensely interested at others. I enjoyed the ways in which this book was different, including the drawings and lithographs that were on every 10 pages or so. This is definitely a different type of read, and for that alone I liked it.

After the first 50 pages, the books suddenly draws you in. Helen is in search of her husband, so she can put an end to a dead marriage. Following his steps, she becomes teh center of a strange mystery, sought after by weird characters whose interst in her is never quite explained.The novel is a page-turner. The descriptions of European cities is detailed and alive. However, a lot of circumstances remain unclear. The reader is left with a lot of whys and how comes. Yet, that said, the novel is so unique that is worth the read.