{"id":1035,"date":"2017-08-08T22:31:30","date_gmt":"2017-08-08T21:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=1035"},"modified":"2018-11-09T15:07:24","modified_gmt":"2018-11-09T15:07:24","slug":"book-review-martino-sclavis-the-finch-in-my-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2017\/08\/08\/book-review-martino-sclavis-the-finch-in-my-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Martino Sclavi\u2019s ‘The Finch in My Brain’"},"content":{"rendered":"

by James Rakoczi<\/a>, PhD\u00a0researcher, Department of English<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The cover image of Martino Scalvi’s ‘The Finch in My Brain’<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Reading Martino Sclavi\u2019s The Finch in My Brain<\/a>\u00a0<\/b><\/em>(Hodder & Stoughton, 2017)\u00a0<\/b><\/em>took longer than expected. I found myself slowing down, re-reading passages, trying to work out how the text relates to itself, to its images, and to the people in Sclavi\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

My copy of the text is now defaced by marginalia, doodled over in an inky green.<\/p>\n

Page 308, for example, tells me to re-read p. 215. I turn that page, and p. 216 directs me to p. 268, and so on. My copy has gone a bit rhizome: an ecology of self-citation…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In early 2011, living in LA, Italian film producer Martino Sclavi was experiencing bad headaches. He thought it was the coffee, or the stresses of script-writing to deadline. In fact, it was a grade 4 glioblastoma<\/a> \u2013 an extremely severe brain tumour. During a script-reading, Sclavi became increasingly delirious. Driven to a hospital by a friend, Sclavi recalls how his friend\u2019s words \u2018stopped having a meaning for me\u2026 just sound with no information. A rhythm with no shape\u2019 (p. 43). This loss of \u2018meaning\u2019 but retention of \u2018shape\u2019 characterised not only Sclavi\u2019s immediate crisis but presaged the direction his life would take.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sclavi benefitted from much medical expertise in his treatment. His first surgeon, Dr Vogel, operated on Sclavi skilfully, cutting out a large chunk of the tumour. \u2018With no Vogel,\u2019 acknowledges Sclavi, \u2018there would be no story\u2019 (p. 18). He was enrolled \u2013 freely \u2013 into a cutting-edge treatment programme in the USA. Then, in Italy, he joined a series of innovative healthcare programmes. This included, most viscerally, an operation in which the remaining tumour was cut out of Sclavi\u2019s brain \u2013 whilst Sclavi remained awake. If Dr Vogel made the story possible, it is this second surgery that makes this story be told the way it is. For after this surgery, Martino Sclavi lost the ability to understand text.<\/p>\n

The Finch in My Brain <\/em>is a book that the writer can never read.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because of this, Sclavi uses a software program he calls Alex. Sclavi writes by typing, but he forgets what he\u2019s writing as he types and cannot read what he writes. So Alex reads back \u2013 in a monotone, robotic voice \u2013 everything in Sclavi\u2019s word processor. Alex \u2018makes every detail of this book possible, but at the same time he flattens every single word\u2019 (p. 216). Alex also becomes a friend for Sclavi\u2019s increasingly isolated existence. On one page, for example, Sclavi has a warm-hearted argument with Alex about whether he meant bagels or beagles (he meant bagels). Alex turns the text into an impressively immediate text: typos become part of its literary strutcure [sic].<\/p>\n

Martino\u2019s estranged wife Margarita interjects with several footnotes throughout the text. These footnotes complicate the text geometrically. They push Sclavi and Alex\u2019s text across the page and spatialize what Martino and Alex write. We become plagued by the possibility that the text\u2019s \u201cMartino\u201d is an unsettled, changing thing \u2013 a morphological entity rather than a coherent subject. \u2018Even If I was finally there, next to you, emotionally you were somewhere else\u2019 (p. 10), writes Margarita.<\/p>\n

This is a unique way of rendering the instability of the subject \u2013 and I was moved by Sclavi\u2019s honesty in including them. I wanted to read more from Sclavi’s estranged wife Margarita.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Finch <\/em>also incorporates a series of chapters, written in Optima font, where Martino talks about his life before diagnosis (from 2000-2010). He tells us that he enjoys writing these chapters because he has \u2018a much easier time recalling my more ancient history\u2019 (p. 49). This method of interweaving an autobiography of one\u2019s life into every other chapter has become something of a generic convention for published illness narrative. It is interesting to learn about Sclavi\u2019s role in the rise of Russell Brand\u2019s career (including Brand\u2019s struggles with addiction<\/a>) as well as his adventures with Hungarian director B\u00e9la Tarr<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, it is in the book\u2019s final third, when the story of Martino\u2019s \u2018ancient history\u2019 reaches the present and these chapters of the past fall away that The Finch <\/em>becomes \u2013 for me \u2013 an altogether more unusual, troubling and experimental book. From then on, the text attempts to live in the present tense. Martino writes his life as he experiences it, as he survives it, and as he philosophises\/poeticises it. From this point, too, the challenges of this review crystallised for me.<\/p>\n

How would you approach \u2013 let alone, judge<\/em> \u2013 a memoir told by a man with a hole in his head, a hole which influences what that text is like?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We could assess the text\u2019s merits by its own self-avowed intentions to transform Sclavi\u2019s condition into \u2018a source for a new vision\u2019 (p. 269), to touch and share something \u2018meaningful\u2019 (p. 232). Or, we could recognise the text as a personal therapeutic strategy, the way writing has \u2018always been\u2019 Sclavi\u2019s \u2018path of self-therapy\u2019 (p. 178). Maybe we could turn this review into a piece of qualitative health research. Did Sclavi recover? Did the text play a role in his recovery? What would it mean to suggest it did? (Sclavi himself says that such matters of health \u2018can\u2019t be studied\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Or, perhaps we could listen. In the spirit of a Samaritan call-volunteer sometimes the thing to do is to be there<\/em>, to attend to the words of another without trying to influence the way those words sound…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A scan of Sclavi’s brain, with its finch-shaped hole. Photo \u00a9Martino Sclavi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The eponymous finch is from the shape of the hole in Martino\u2019s head. The formlessness of a hole takes on shape. The wordlessness of a writer produces a book. The book has flaws. It fails to explore properly the economic privilege of Martino\u2019s healthcare. It recognises the importance of intersubjectivity<\/a> but remains unable, I think, to concretise this importance. I am also unsure whether the therapeutic strategies it embraces are sound\u2014certainly, they are not politically neutral. But through these flaws, a defiant account of surviving emerges. Listen. We will hear Sclavi tell a story of how wordlessness speaks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Featured image illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare\/based on a portrait by Massimo Scognamiglio, \u00a9 The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

You may also like to read<\/p>\n

The Long Read: Arabic Illness Narratives and National Politics<\/a><\/p>\n

Book Review: Literature and the Public Good<\/a><\/p>\n

Book Review: Thinking in Cases\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Confessions of a Medical Humanist<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Blog posts on King\u2019s English represent the views of the individual authors and neither those of the English Department, nor of King\u2019s College London.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by James Rakoczi, PhD\u00a0researcher, Department of English Reading Martino Sclavi\u2019s The Finch in My Brain\u00a0(Hodder & Stoughton, 2017)\u00a0took longer than expected. I found myself slowing down, re-reading passages, trying to work out how the text relates to itself, to its images, and to the people in Sclavi\u2019s life. My copy of the text is now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":685,"featured_media":1040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[245,12,26,23],"tags":[319,316,320,318,317,313,314,315,142],"class_list":["post-1035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","category-contemporary","category-culture-text-and-history","category-literature-medicine-and-science","tag-bela-tarr","tag-brain-tumour","tag-computer-program","tag-hole","tag-illness","tag-intersubjectivity","tag-martino-sclavi","tag-russell-brand","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/685"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1035"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1064,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions\/1064"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}