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The Doctor’s House

by Cary Fagan

Toronto writer Cary Fagan has called his new book, The Doctor’s House, “a miniature novel.” At 76 pages it is certainly miniature in its physical dimensions, although Fagan manages more in the small confines of his work than many a wordier writer might manage in 700 pages.

Josef is a Polish gentile boy whose mother takes a job housekeeping for Reb Mendelsohn and his large family. For 10 years he lives a quiet, enjoyable life in the Jewish family until, inevitably, the villagers turn on the Mendelsohn household, kill the other occupants, and in destroying the house, leave Josef alive with a badly damaged leg. He is taken in by Krochmal, the local doctor, a kindly and wise man, who sets his leg and brings him up in his family. There is another pleasant interlude while the boy grows well again, learns to read, helps the grandfather of the house with his work as a bookbinder, and nurses a disconcerting love for the doctor’s haughty daughter, Chava. In an effort to become more like the Krochmal family, Josef has the doctor circumcise him. He is happy. But the dark history of 20th-century Europe sweeps down upon the happy household once more. The Nazis arrive with fire and bloodshed. They maim, they kill, and they destroy Josef’s idyll. As bombs fall all around him, he seizes Chava, to save her with the only thing he can use, his imagination.

Nobody who knows Fagan’s writing will be surprised at either the compelling narrative pace of his “miniature,” nor at the poetry of his language and imagery. There is nothing superfluous here, nothing flashy or self-conscious – only the writing of someone to whom the act of writing seems as natural as the act of breathing.

The Doctor’s House is a miniature novel, an extended fairy tale, and a poetic meditation with its feet in the real and dirty world. I wish there had been 700 pages of it.

 

Reviewer: Roger Burford Mason

Publisher: paperplates books

DETAILS

Price: $10

Page Count: 76 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-9680457-0-7

Released: May

Issue Date: 1996-6

Categories: Fiction: Novels