Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
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An Imperfect Lens
By Anne Roiphe
Shaye Areheart. 296 pp. $25
Reviewed by Susan Hall-Balduf
Unseen pulsing, crescent moon shapes, safe in their invisible, rapid motion, moved like vastly shrunken versions of the Word of God on the walls of a recalcitrant kingdom. The boy carried them on his foot, in his cup, in his pail. No one rejected the water he offered... . The tissue in their throats plumped with water as it flowed with the tilt of the head back toward their throats, bringing relief.
You want to get a drink? Wash your hands while you're at it. That lovely water, so delightfully described by novelist Anne Roiphe, is tainted with cholera.
Her new novel, An Imperfect Lens, makes its elegant way through 1883 Alexandria, Egypt, where cholera is not only sluicing away the deserving poor, it's turning the bedrooms of the well-to-do into sewers. Someone has to do something, and someone will: Louis Pasteur is about to send a team of scientists to Egypt to identify and conquer the microbe that causes this terrible disease, for the glory of France.
But before Roiphe can get her plot, based on real-life events in the battle against infection, she has to wallow in her germ:
Everywhere the organism pushed, floated, drifted, gathered, it erased, eradicated, ignored a mother's love for her child, or a man's desire for his wife, devoured memories fond and unfond, left church bells ringing, bodies piled on carts.
Doesn't she sound like a vampire licking her chops?
Now I'm going to wash my hands.
But the good guys are getting off the boat with their microscopes and so forth, and the competition is disembarking as well: Dr. Robert Koch, the dour German who discovered the tuberculosis microbe.
The Frenchmen, Louis Thuillier, Emile Roux and veterinarian Edmond Nocard - one begins the study of disease by making an animal sick - go to dinner at their embassy. The company is gaily terrified; their expectations are high, and Louis especially worries that the team won't find the microbe.
And he knows that even if they do, they won't be able to save this city; it will be some city ahead in time that benefits.
But Louis manages to distract himself by falling in love with a young woman at the party. Her name is Este Malina, the daughter of a prominent local physician.
She thinks he's a bore and she wants to marry a poet - not that her Jewish parents would let her marry outside her faith.
Este's entire life is boring, so much so that she finds her way into the Frenchmen's lab and starts washing up the glassware.
When Louis shows her the tiny creatures under his microscope, she decides he is a poet of sorts, after all. They begin the kind of romance evinced by delicate sighs and little glances.
This can't end well, of course. Eventually cholera has to be blamed on someone, and you can guess no one nominates the Christians.
While all this personal drama goes on, by the way, bad-tempered Koch actually makes some medical progress.
Roiphe says in her afterword that she began the novel as a tribute to her brother, a medical researcher who died of AIDS. This is not her only novel; I would guess he was proud of her long before she got to cholera.
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