The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind
NOGA ARIKHA
(BASIC, 304 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064
How about this for the start of a thriller? One day in 2016, overweight thirtysomething Vanessa fainted. When her husband couldn’t rouse her, he called for an ambulance. A while later, in Paris’ Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, Vanessa came groggily round. Tests were carried out, and the medics decided that she had fallen into a hyperglycaemic coma thanks to hitherto undiagnosed diabetes. Insulin was prescribed, and her husband took Vanessa home. Or did he? Because according to Vanessa, she doesn’t have a husband – and she has never before seen the country house he claims is theirs. She lives alone in the city, she insists. She isn’t 36, but 26. Oh, and she’s not fat: she’s thin.
Vanessa (not her real name) became a long-term patient at the hospital. Thanks to that coma, Noga Arikha explains in this mind-expanding memoir-cum-meditation on matters medicinal, Vanessa had effectively lost 10 years of her life. A policy advisor with exceptional powers of recall (her friends called her the “hard disk”), Vanessa was so off the qui vive after her accident that she believed Jacques Chirac was still president. Unaccountably tired, unable to recognise colleagues and clients who all know her, Vanessa tells the doctors and consultants that she wants her life back.
