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THE MAN WHO WALKED AWAY
By: 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 walksβfrom Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russiaβall 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, heβs 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. AndrΓ© in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, The Man Who Walked Away imagines Albertβs 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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