Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Betty MacDonald, Lissa Evans and The Plague and I

  Anne MacDonald Canham

Bildergebnis für Firland Sanatorium

 

The Plague and I by Betty MacDonald

Chosen by Lissa Evans

“I had braced myself for a year-long stay; these casual mentions by other patients of staying two, three or even five years, made me feel as though I had just finished a hearty dinner and then been informed by my laughing hostess that she had canned those funny-tasting oysters herself.”
In 1937, Betty MacDonald, a divorcee living in Seattle, contracted tuberculosis. In 1948, after the enormous success of her first book, The Egg and I – about living on a chicken farm – she wrote a second, entitled The Plague and I, about her experiences in a sanatorium. Thomas Mann it ain’t, but while I’ve read The Magic Mountain once, The Plague and I has been a constant companion since I discovered it as a teenager.



Separated from her large, loud, loving family, placed on a regime of total bed-rest, perpetually cold (part of the “cure” was having all of the windows open, all of the time), hovering between loneliness, terror and utter boredom, MacDonald writes about her seclusion in a way that is painfully, barkingly funny. “I lay there, remembering the year we had sat at the Thanksgiving dinner table for four hours listening to a deservedly lonely man from Mary’s office recall every bridge hand he had held since 1908 …”
Her style is completely her own, the sprawling sentences packed with anecdote, incident, bang-on simile and throwaway wit – it’s like overhearing a conversation between someone who keeps forgetting to breathe and another who keeps asking “and what happened next?”
So, my panacea for 40 years has been a funny book about chronic illness. Fingers crossed it keeps working …
Lissa Evans’s Crooked Heart is published by Black Swan.

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Vita Magica Betty MacDonald event with Wolfgang Hampel, Thomas Bödigheimer and Friedrich von Hoheneichen

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Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English ) 

Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English ) - The Egg and I 

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Vashon Island - Wikipedia ( German )

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Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( French ) 


Wolfgang Hampel - Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle - Wikipedia ( English)

Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University 

Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel 

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Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund  


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