All mysterious Albert does is walk. He walks from city to
city to country to country, and he, nor anyone else, knows
exactly why. The Doctor has seen many spectacles, but none
quite like Albert. Mental health knowledge is still
developing, but the Doctor does the best he can to figure
out the mystery behind this man who walks and walks.
While parts of THE MAN WHO WALKED AWAY by Maud Casey are
intriguing, it ended up not being a good book for me. Albert
is super interesting, and he's loosely based on a real
person. His mindset is both sad and mesmerizing at the same
time. The point of view wasn't first person, but I almost
wish it was because it would have been really cool to see
exactly how Albert and the Doctor thought in their own head.
The limited perspective on them made it hard for me to
connect with the characters.
The little inserts of the swan tale adds a little magic to
the story, and I liked that a lot. It gives a nice contrast
to what Albert is going through, and it was great how the
contrast kept up throughout the whole novel.
Overall, this just wasn't the novel for me. THE MAN WHO
WALKED AWAY has some really nice elements to it,
particularly in the intriguing fact that it's loosely based
on a true story. Maud Casey can certainly spin a story; it
just wasn't the story for me. I could see bigger fans of
literary fiction enjoying more than I did. Even so, I'm
definitely still interested in seeing what else this author
comes up with.
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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