In a trance-like state, Albert walks - from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia - all over Europe. When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he's left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images.
Loosely based on the case history of Albert Dadas, a psychiatric patient in the hospital of St. Andre in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, The Man Who Walked Away imagines Albert's wanderings and the anguish that caused him to seek treatment with a doctor who would create a diagnosis for him, a narrative for his pain.
In a time when mental health diagnosis is still as much art as science, Maud Casey takes us back to its tentative beginnings and offers us an intimate relationship between one doctor and his patient as, together, they attempt to reassemble a lost life. Through Albert she gives us a portrait of a man untethered from place and time who, in spite of himself, kept setting out, again and again, in search of wonder and astonishment.
This review in its entirety was originally posted at caffeinatedlife.net: http://www.caffeinatedlife.net/blog/2013/12/18/review-the-man-who-walked-away/
The Man Who Walked Away, while quiet in the way its story unfolds and sometimes a little slow with nothing happening, is a very lyrical novel. The lines, the imagery it provokes feels as fleeting as some of the feelings that Albert is struggling with, like everything is simply transitory.
Albert was the character that intrigued me with his walks, his endless longing and searching for something that seems rather intangible. Like the Doctor, the reader finds him or herself trying to figure out who Albert is and how he’s come to where he is in his life. The other characters that populated this story were also interesting but not in the same way as Albert had captured my attention.
The Man Who Walked Away is ultimately a strange, curious experience. It’s beautifully written but at times underwhelming. Nonetheless, readers of historical fiction and introspective character drama may find this novel interesting.
