June 2, 2007

  • This one I picked up while in Egypt and is a novelization of French and German missions sent to Alexandria, Egypt in the late nineteenth century in order to find the microbe causing cholera and to find a cure for this infectious disease.  Roche builds an atmosphere akin to your modern horror film where you feel that evil is around every corner and you can feel its presence sight unseen.  But cholera has been a very real evil of reality and has been capable of killing tens of thousands in a matter of days.  Roche makes a point (which becomes a bit repetitive) that while the disease was everywhere, contact with the disease was quite random and the forces of fate had some role to play on who was infected and who was not.  Her descriptions of what the disease did to the bodies of its victims rivaled that of any horror film in its goriness and would satisfy your morbid curiosity. 

    Roche's novel is a bit weak on the scientific experiments and processes which was disappointing to me. She instead throws a love story into the mix which is of complete fiction. I don't think it added much to the book and I would've rather learned more about the scientific aspect of the missions.  The relationship aspect was only of interest due to the other topics that were brought out of it including class divides, religious affiliations, and the topic of arranged marriages.

    This was an easy beach read albiet on a rather gruesome topic.