ROUND AND ROUND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 534, 16 September 1949, Page 13

ROUND AND ROUND

A JOURNEY ROUND MY SKULL, by Frigyes Karinthy; Faber and Faber. English price, 8/6. E-READING this new issue of a Hungarian writer’s account of an ill--ness, I wonder whether the book has not been somewhat over-estimated. I read on the dust jacket the ecstatic remarks of the critics of 1939 and remain

somewhat nonplussed. Notoriously other people’s symptoms are tather a bore. Add their dreams, and the risk of their becoming tiresome is considerable, Karinthy defends himself with some. adroitness from the anticipated charge of egocentricity, and yet this intense preoccupation with self is the main point of the book. The descriptions of his relations with his doctors are excellent. Karinthy, once a medical student and now married to a doctor, all too often backed his own judgment against the professional. Only once was he right-when, after he was finally trepanned in Stockholm by a famous Swedish brain surgeon, he had an instinct that his sight would not be affected, as the specialist had feared, In the early stages of the growth of the tumour on his brain he must have been quite intolerable to deal with, flitting from doctor to doctor until he got a kinder diagnosis (controlling some doctors "like mediums" to get the answer he wanted), checking up on what they said by looking it all up in a text book or getting yet another opinion, and evading treatment until he was himself convinced. Karinthy confesses to a "selfdramatising instinct." He has given full play to this and created a document in which the undertones and implications are of greater interest than his main

narrative:

David

Hall