Featured Reading Guide
Sebastian Faulks
As young boys both Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter become fascinated with trying to understand the human mind.As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the two men s volatile relationship develops and changes, but is always tempered by one exceptional woman; Thomas s sister Sonia. Moving and challenging…
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Sebastian Faulks worked as a journalist for 14 years before taking up writing books full time in 1991. He is the author of A Trick of Light , The Girl at the Lion D’Or , A Fool’s Alphabet , The Fatal Englishman , Birdsong , Charlotte Gray , On Green Dolphin Street and, most recently, Human Traces .
topAbout the Book
As young boys both Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter become fascinated with trying to understand the human mind.As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the two men s volatile relationship develops and changes, but is always tempered by one exceptional woman; Thomas s sister Sonia. Moving and challenging in equal measure, Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men and women really are
topSebastian Faulks interview/review
Sebastian Faulks’s study is like a general’s war room. On the walls are meticulous, pencilled plans – as if his new novel were a campaign. The plans were put up to ensure that, over the 50-year trajectory of the novel, he wouldn’t step out of historical line. He’d know when Darwin did this, Einstein that, when cars were first seen on the streets of Vienna. And now his most ambitious novel, Human Traces (at 600 pages), is complete. It’s about madness, psychiatry, romance – and ends with the First World War.
Faulks would have made a good soldier himself: attentive, upstanding, dutiful. He may not like being interviewed, but he is not about to go Awol. He never ducks questions. He is amusing and exceptionally nice. But he has an astonishing habit of taking pot shots at his own work: he can’t do dialogue, he says. He overwrites opening chapters: ‘I tend to describe every stair-rod. I am writing to convince myself, really.’ He is unarrogant, disparaging, truthful. To hear him talk, you’d think he wasn’t a best-selling novelist at all.
Kate Kellaway’s full interview with Sebastian Faulks about Human Traces in the Observer is available at http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1552749,00.html
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Consider the form of the novel. What different types of writing are involved in the book – think about Jacques’ case notes, Charcot’s lectures, Olivier’s interior monologues and the description of Daniel’s experiences in the war. What do you think this variety in the texture of the writing adds to the book? What books does Human Traces remind you of?
- What is the significance of Jacques mistaken diagnosis of Kitty? In what ways are Thomas and Jacques opposites? Discuss their differing theories on the human mind. What other oppositions are set up in the novel?
- ‘She remembered how restored he had been in the days that followed the arrival of the telegram…Her subterfuge had worked as well as she could have hoped, and if she had desisted at the time from telling him, there seemed no reason to break her silence now.’ How does Faulks uses the different characters’ (and the reader’s) understandings of certain situations, such as Roya’s affair with Jacques and Olivier’s inner world, to dramatic effect? Does Faulks use our awareness of how research into mental illness has developed in this way to add another dimension to the book?
- What would you say the message of Human Traces is?
- ‘“So far as I know, that is what it means to love someone. To bend all your powers to their happiness. All of them. To be everything.”’ Discuss the character of Sonia. What roles does she play in the novel?
Other Books by Sebastian Faulks
A Fool’s Alphabet
The events of Pietro Russell’s life are told in 26 chapters. From A-Z each …
A Week in December
London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days we follow the lives…
Birdsong
Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era…
Suggested Further Reading
- The Magic Mountain ~ Thomas Mann
- The Madness of Adam and Eve ~ David Horrobin
- Saturday ~ Ian McEwan
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ~ Ken Kesey
- The Freud Reader ~ Peter Gay
- War and Peace ~ Leo Tolstoy