Product Description

Acclaimed author Anne Roiphe evokes the sights and sounds of 1880s Alexandria, Egypt, a bustling center of trade and travel. From teeming docks to overflowing market stalls, from grand homes to grimy narrow alleyways, cholera microbes rise and bob in streams of water and tiny droplets, clinging to moisture as man clings to air.

With a keen mind and dedication to his work, young Louis Thuillier has impressed his mentor—famed scientist Louis Pasteur—enough to be sent to Alexandria as one-third of the French mission searching for the source of the cholera that is terrorizing the city. Along with the other members of the French mission—scientists Emile Roux and Edmond Nocard and their enterprising servant Marcus—Louis longs to find the cure, bringing glory to himself and to France. Este Malina is the lovely daughter of a respected Jewish doctor, whose family has lived in Alexandria for hundreds of years. A life of comfort has made Este a romantic, and she hopes to marry a man with the heart of a poet. Neither expects to find a soul mate in the other, but when Este begins to assist at the French mission’s lab, a deep bond forms. Este, though, is engaged to another, and Louis is not Jewish—her family would never allow them to marry.

In spite of their many differences, the lovers’ desire grows and their fantasies threaten to distract them from their work. In Alexandria, the disease rages on, as mysterious as it was a thousand years before. Political intrigue threatens to separate Este and Louis permanently. Their love, as fragile as the glass slides they use in the lab, is in danger before it has had a chance to thrive.

With An Imperfect Lens, rich with the sights and scents of a different era, Anne Roiphe once again demonstrates the storytelling power for which she has long been hailed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #962060 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-24
• Released on: 2006-01-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Cholera arrives in Alexandria in 1883, followed by an intrepid French research team sent by Louis Pasteur to find and identify the "swimming monster." In this riveting account of a public health crisis and the (then) cutting-edge science that aimed to save countless lives, Roiphe (Secrets of the City) blends fact with fiction to bring historical scientists to life. The team includes Louis Thuillier, whose exacting professional persona belies a romantic side; compassionate veterinarian Edmond Nocard; Emile Roux, much respected, if a bit rough around the edges; and their fun-loving young assistant, Marcus. The Frenchmen race rampant death—and the German Dr. Robert Koch, who discovered the cause of tuberculosis—to find the cholera microbe. Roiphe weaves a love story within the urgent scientific mission, providing Thuillier with an object of affection in Este Malina, the intellectually curious daughter of a Jewish doctor. Este admires the medical passion of the French scientists, Thuillier in particular, and the two fall in love when she begins assisting in their lab. Against Alexandria's vibrant backdrop, Roiphe infuses her richly textured, propulsive story with a sense of doom brought by a microscopic enemy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Fearlessness has always been one of the most attractive features of Anne Roiphe's career. Her eight previous novels each ventured into territory new to her, from Up the Sandbox! (1970), with its feminist wish-fulfillment fantasies, to The Pursuit of Happiness (1991), a wide-ranging generational saga; from musings about religious ambivalence in Lovingkindness (1987) to the subtleties of a middle-aged love affair in If You Knew Me (1993).

Roiphe's newest novel again shows off her adventurous spirit. Set in 1883 during a cholera epidemic in Alexandria, Egypt, the tale follows a team of three French scientists who are dispatched to that distant city by an aging Louis Pasteur to isolate the cholera microbe. The exotic locale and the mix of historical fact and fabrication are characteristically bold choices for Roiphe, not to mention the certainty that this 19th-century health crisis will provoke reminders of the nightmare plagues -- AIDS, bird flu -- of our own day.

Arriving in Alexandria, Roiphe's three Frenchmen encounter a vibrant, filthy port city, bustling with commerce stimulated by ships carrying textiles and spices -- as well as disease. Despite the current epidemic, business is brisk: "We are alarmed, but not yet panicked," declares Dr. Malina, the community's most prominent physician. The French scientists get to work immediately, injecting local animals with cholera in an attempt to grow the virus. More is at stake for these men than merely saving lives: They are also engaged in a nationalistic race against a renowned German doctor, recently credited with discovering the cause of tuberculosis and now conducting similar experiments in Alexandria.

Further heightening the drama is a romance that blooms between 27-year-old Louis Thuillier, the French team's youngest member, and Este Malina, the beautiful daughter of the town's distinguished Jewish doctor, whose family has thrived in Alexandria for more than 300 years. Este becomes enthralled with Louis and his work and sets about making herself useful in the laboratory, eventually hatching a plan to marry the scientist and accompany him back to France as his assistant.

Much stands in the way of Este's dream, however, including the inconvenient fact of her engagement to a banker. Another serious complication arises when the Malina family is accused of spying by British authorities, who recently took control of the government from the French. Eager to shore up their shaky new hold on the city, the anti-Semitic colonial bureaucrats make easy pawns of the Malinas, throwing the doctor in jail on false charges and threatening to exile his family from Egypt.

Roiphe has chosen to weave her tale out of three narrative strands -- a thriller, a love story and a meditation on the nature of disease -- each of which ought to be effective. Yet the thriller element, which unfolds as a sort of 19th-century "CSI" episode, lacks momentum: The Frenchmen spend most of the book failing to find the germ. Similarly, the romance between Louis and Este is a stiff and formal affair, too tastefully executed to suggest much hectic passion between them.

If Roiphe's story of love in the time of cholera lacks convincing romance, it also -- rather unexpectedly -- lacks sufficient cholera. While Roiphe does provide graphic descriptions of illness and death all around Alexandria, those deaths are all incidental. It's not until the book's final pages that a main character succumbs to the disease, whereupon it is nearly too late for the reader to connect emotionally to its horrors. As Roiphe herself points out, "Large numbers of bodies are in many ways far less upsetting than a single corpse. . . . We are capable of mourning only one by one, and a mass grave leaves as light a touch on our hearts as none at all."

In these and many other reflections on epidemics and their consequences, Roiphe rescues the narrative from its flaws. She mentions in an author's note that she was inspired to write this book in honor of her brother, a hematologist who died of AIDS. One cannot help being moved by her personal connection to the story when reading those passages about the precariousness of health and the stealth of disease, which are by far the book's most eloquent parts, and which make An Imperfect Lens, despite its imperfections, a historical novel with a strikingly contemporary sensibility.

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Commissioned by an aging Louis Pasteur to identify and isolate the cholera microbe and "bring glory to France," an eclectic band of young researchers arrive in plague-stricken Alexandria in 1883. Set loose in this exotic locale, these novice scientists face a daunting task as pestilence and disease ravage the city. In addition to racing against time and famed German scientist Dr. Robert Koch, the team members face multiple political, cultural, and romantic distractions. Roiphe does an incredible job of painting paradoxical portraits of collective fear and coolheaded reason as she painstakingly reconstructs the life cycle of a deadly epidemic. This authentically detailed blend of fact and fiction gift wraps the history of an astonishing medical and scientific breakthrough inside an irresistible love story, providing a little something for everyone across a wide spectrum of readers. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Fails to Impress
An Imperfect Lens is the true story of the 1883 cholera outbreak in Alexandria, Egypt, and follows Louis Thuillier, a young French scientist, as he and his colleagues race to discover the microbe responsible for the disease. The full title of the book, however, is An Imperfect Lens: A Novel--this latter designation allowing Roiphe to create a story around the historical facts. This she does in the form of a love story between Thuillier and a fictional protagonist.

In style, An Imperfect Lens reminds me of the work of Richard Preston and Erik Larson. But while The Hot Zone (Preston) and The Devil in the White City (Larson) are nonfiction that read like novels, Roiphe's book is a novel that reads like nonfiction. The characters are not very well developed, the story predictable, and even her detailed descriptions of Alexandria failed to move me (perhaps because, as is apparent in the Author's Note and Acknowledgements, she has never been to Alexandria).

Yet it is not a scientific history, either; there is very little to be learned about cholera itself. There are passages describing epidemics going back to ancient times, but we know only as much as the doctors and scientists in 1883. The descriptions of how the disease manifests itself are graphic but not especially informative, and little is said about the reasoning behind the scientists' methods.

If this were meant purely as a history, I would consider it better. However, Roiphe chose to create a separate story, in which she was limited only by her imagination, and it is in fact rather boring.

Perhaps her final statement in the Author's Note sums it up best:
"If any reader suspects that I would rather have been a scientist than a writer, I would immediately confess my preference for truth over fiction."

Superb novel, direct to the soul
"If the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul?" Walt Whitman wrote, in what could be the epigraph to this wonderful novel of science and love. Anne Roiphe shows that the men seeking to save the human body from the ravages of disease are modern knights. As a girl, her heroine dreams of a poet; as a woman, she discovers love with a scientist. Every sentence of the story is poetry - but sharper poetry than Lawrence Durell's prose about the same city, Alexandria. When you start reading, be ready not to stop till the last word.

"This is the world we live in. We share it with cholera."
An Imperfect Lens is atmospheric tale set in Alexandra, Egypt in 1883; the main character a lethal disease, cholera: ''unseen pulsing crescent moonshapes," that are steadily breeding in the exposed sewage, killing the city's poor, gradually finding its way into the houses of the rich. Feeding in the stomachs of the innocent, death is almost instantaneous - a sharp pain in the stomach, lips tinged with blue, a loss of bowel control, the body shriveled, turned grey like slate.

Paranoia is rife; the wealthy see it as a sign of the city's drinking and lack of morality, the less fortunate see it as a mark of God's will, a way for the rich to rid the city of an unwanted population. How is the disease transmitted? By air or bird droppings, or perhaps even food. People are instructed to always rinse their hands, and never eat unwashed food from market stalls. But the microbes continue to spread, on the edges of bed linen, on the shoes of unsuspecting servants, splashing in the city's puddles, streams and open sewers, on the surface of fruit, the edges of plates and cutlery.

Three Chemists from Paris - Louis Thuilliers, Emile Roux and veterinarian Edmond Nocard - are dispatched directly from the laboratories of famous scientist Louis Pasteur to Alexandra, hoping to isolate the microbe. The sights, sounds and smells of this exotic city, immediately seduce the idealistic Louis. Almost at once, he falls for Este Malina, the daughter of the City's Jewish doctor, who is the verge of being engaged when Louis meets her at dinner at the French consulate's home.

Este, bored with her life, begins to help out in the laboratory, awakening to the possibility of a career in the sciences, with Louis at her side. She hopes to marry her paramour, but her imminent engagement and Louis's humble background irrevocably stands between them. Her religion also is a barrier, with her father and his wife, considering the Jewish faith so much more than just a faith "but a cord that inevitably binds them."

Louis and Este's love affair plays out against a cholera epidemic that pressingly evades the lens of the scientists and the city's authorities. The other characters are equally caught in this stew of city waste, men with their own personal demons and small enjoyments: There's Eric Fortman, an Englishman from Liverpool, a good salesman and a sturdy traveler, determined to start a new life in Alexandra as an importer and a businessman, a type of reinvented merchant prince who can slip money into the right hands at the right time.

And there's Marcus, Louis's rebellious young assistant, who one night beneath the boardwalk, witnesses Masika, a hotel maid, succumb to the disease: "pools of fecal liquid gathering by her hips, the illness taking over her body like a colonial power, killing everything in its way."

The lives of the main protagonists, however, are diminished in the light of author Anne Rophie's harrowing and exquisitely wrought descriptions of a city on the brink, where in the bazaar, the olive pits and the splashes of wine and overripe fruit mingle on the cobblestones with the blood of slaughtered animals. Children with their hands out, crouching in doorways, flies stuck to their encrusted eyelids. The heavy sweat of the day, the dust in which all these things are stirred, and a young boy who suddenly becomes ill and violently dies, "the contents of his bowls flowing over the mud of the stone curb."

Rophie's Alexandria is historically accurate, with cholera not simply content to attack the intestines of its victim, but ravage pocketbooks of the entire town, spreading hunger and despair, sending thousands to pray and others to shut themselves up in their rooms. Her characters are young and impulsive, overwhelmed by idealism, yet torn apart and frustrated by their inability to fight this terrible disease, caught up in a race, where everything they try proves useless.

An Imperfect Lens is not an easy book to read, and it's depictions of the epidemic are unflinching in their detail. Yet it shows that the war between man and bacteria is endless and constantly changing and is never won entirely, by one side or the other. The story is a timely reminder of the importance of research and science in a world where everyone needs to understand that things must be proved and evidence given, so that human life can be saved and that hopefully all disease can be defeated. Mike Leonard April 06.