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The Man Who Walked Away
Maud Casey
Bloomsbury USA
March 2014
On Sale: March 4, 2014
Featuring: Albert Dadas; Maud Casey
240 pages ISBN: 1620403110 EAN: 9781620403112 Kindle: B00GGKRZF6 Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
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. André 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.
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