Narrative
A Journey Round My Skull
Utazás a koponyám körül
Frigyes Karinthy · 1937
Synopsis
Budapest, March 1936. A writer sitting in a café hears the rumble of a train that does not exist. The noise returns every day, with headaches, dizziness and blurred vision; the doctors of Budapest find nothing. In Vienna, where his wife is training in neurology, the diagnosis comes: a brain tumour. Friends gather the money for the journey, and he leaves for Stockholm, where the surgeon Herbert Olivecrona agrees to operate on him under local anaesthetic, while he remains awake.
Context
Operated on on 4 May 1936 in Stockholm, thanks to a collection organised by Lajos Hatvany among his admirers, the author begins writing in the summer; the account appears as a serial in the Pesti Napló from September 1936 to March 1937, then in book form from Athenaeum in 1937. A patient's diary, it describes precisely and with humour what he perceives and thinks during the operation, which also made him known to foreign doctors.
Who it is for
An autobiographical narrative of about two hundred and fifty pages, precise and funny; translated into French and English.
Prizes and reception
The most popular novel by its author, adapted for the screen in 1970, and reissued in English with a preface by Oliver Sacks.
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