**** The circle of former TB patients
This book
by Linda Grant, whom I had already quite appreciated in “Upstairs at the Party”,
transports the reader to a British sanatorium in the 1950s where tuberculosis
patients were kept, or perhaps the most correct word is segregated. The story
takes place at a time when streptomycin had already been discovered, but had
not yet arrived in the UK, so the characters live in the hope that they can be
cured sooner or later and not end up like all their predecessors.
The story
specifically follows two teenage London twins, Lenny and Miriam, who are sent
to a sanatorium in Kent by the British National Health System. Here they live
with people from a very different social background, but the disease that
unites all of them smooths out the differences and allows the creation of very
close relationships.
The author
uses tones that are sometimes light in telling the stories of the protagonists,
but alongside this she describes the painful, cruel and useless treatments, as
well as the psychological abuse, to which all patients are subjected. The
contrast between the two leaves its mark as you read, as you go from laughter
to horror, anger and sadness, and makes you mull over when you close the book.
The
characters come out of the pages and their banal daily vicissitudes, in the way
they are shown to us by the author, become almost compelling, as well as one is
shocked to enter the sick mind of the doctor who is supposed to cure them.
For me it
was also an opportunity to learn more about the historical period in relation
to the clumsy attempts to treat tuberculosis, before effective and definitive
cures were available.
I didn’t
put the fifth star on because of the bittersweet ending. Perhaps it was
difficult to come up with a better one, given the story, but, as happened with
the other book by the author that I read, I had the distinct impression that
there was a drop in tension and excessive dragging into the final part of the
book.
The Dark Circle on Amazon.
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