Word: fitzgerald
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...been in Paris for 6 weeks. All summer I had been walking past cafés where Hemingway drank himself into (and out of) depression. An American in Paris, I couldn’t help but think about that earlier, more famous group of Americans in Paris: Fitzgerald, Stein, Miller, Hemingway. (The fact that every other person I spoke to brought up “A Moveable Feast,” the precious book where Hemingway nostalgically trashes all of his friends and mentors, only encouraged this train of thought.) And so, with only a week left, I finally succumbed...
...Canadian doctor of Vietnamese-Chinese origins, and uses his firsthand experience of the world of medicine to underpin the dozen stories in this book. The pieces are interrelated, lightly and adroitly, by the recurrence of four common characters, Fitzgerald, Chen, Ming and Sri, all doctors. In some stories, Lam writes about his characters in the third person; for others, he uses the first. In less adept hands, this technique could easily seem affected. But Lam's handling of the quickly shifting perspectives is deft and gives the collection an agreeable dynamism...
...opening work, How to Get into Medical School, Part I, is an achingly sweet love story featuring Fitzgerald and Ming, both preparing for entrance to the University of Toronto Medical School. The second installment of their tale - which, in a clever use of pacing, runs not consecutively but as the third story in this volume - charts the melancholy end of their relationship. Ming is now seeing Chen - another student and someone, as we find out later in the collection, whom she will marry - while Fitzgerald is left behind in Ottawa to retake his exams. In the finest story...
...Long Migration, the least clinically themed story in the book, is Chen's delicate, mosaiced account of trying to piece together the story of his grandfather's life - a tale of several marriages, migration and diaspora. In Contact Tracing, another piece that ratchets up the tension, Fitzgerald is dying of SARS, having contracted it while evacuating a patient from Shenzhen. In the respiratory isolation room next to his is Chen, also infected because he treated Fitzgerald in the initial stages. The ending rewrites any kind of expectation that we may have held in our minds, given that these...
...because of "the way they fill our fixed space" and because of "the volume of noise that we actually hear ... the crying of the child, the belligerence of drunkenness, the thin whine of a failed suicide." And there is a jaded professionalism in the med-school lesson recalled by Fitzgerald during a long night shift: "Always sit down with the patient. It makes it seem like you've spent more time and that you care. If you give this impression (this is the subtext) then the patients will do what you say and leave quickly...