Novel
Jealousy and Medicine
Zazdrość i medycyna
Michał Choromański · 1933
Synopsis
In an unnamed town, over the course of a week, the wealthy industrialist Widmar suspects his young wife Rebeka of an affair with the surgeon Tamten, who operated on her while her husband was away, an operation she told him nothing about. Widmar pays his tailor, the poor Abraham Gold, to spy on the lovers, draws another doctor into his investigation and sinks deeper into suspicion; the notebooks of a former fiancée he abandoned for Rebeka add their own. The novel opens with a power cut that plunges the town into darkness.
Context
The author's second novel, written at Zakopane and dedicated to the painter Rafał Malczewski, the book appeared in Warsaw from Gebethner i Wolff; the volume bears no date, and bibliographies date it to 1933. It opens on the final event and then goes back over the course of the week, with simultaneous scenes. An immediate success, it was translated in the thirties into Czech, French and Estonian, then into English in 1946; Janusz Majewski brought it to the screen in 1973.
Who it is for
A novel of learned construction, which reads like an investigation and leaves the reader long in uncertainty.
Prizes and reception
Youth Prize of the Polish Academy of Literature, reserved for an author under thirty; the best known of his books.
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