Sick
Harriet Waugh The Verdict Hildegard Knef (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.50)
Illness is one of the hardest subjects for writers to tackle successfully—especially their own illnesses. Poor Hildegard Knef, an actress-singer who has already written one autobiography about her childhood in Nazi Germany, here gives an account of her body's fight for survival under the knife of foreign doctors in private clinics. She underwent a patchwork of operations on her stomach, after a botched bp Caesarean operation which left her child crippled and gave her abscesses in the womb. Then, having nearly died at least half a dozen times, she discovered that she had cancer and had to have a breast removed.
Her book does, every now and then, make very painful reading. Unfortunately, the effect is somewhat lessened by ber opaque, feminine style; it is like trying to read through a smoke-screen. With the exception of her husband and a couple of friends, the people she describes are grotesques who are removed from the naturalistic world but fail to inhabit a surreal one. One character in the course of two pages murmurs, chortles, cries strickenly, whispers, roars, yells, snarls and barks, but at no time just talks. In -the same two pages the character throws his overcoat, shakes his grey blond mane, starts galloping about, bangs his head against a door, grins selfconsciously, bows his head, bares his teeth to the mountain tops, springs back against a wall, paces, tears his glasses from his nose, nods and puffs, jogs with his hands behind his back and his head inclined to one side, claps his hands, leaps into view, spreads his arms, tumbles backwards, coils like a spring, leaps forward, covers his face with his hands, gives the mountains a withering look through his fingers. Then he is again galloping, grabs his coat, runs down a passage, and falls down the stairs. The man whose gyrations she is describing is not a madman but a bone doctor who examined her for a pain in her back. His hyperactivity is echoed by nearly everyone else in the bciok, which makes for tedium. However, when every now and then the characters stop bouncing off the furniture, the narrative becomes vivid and interesting.
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