When I first started reading Jessie Greengrass's Sight I was so impressed that I was hoping if nothing else it would make it to the shortlist of the Women's Prize for Fiction, which happily it has. The novel is unusual in that so much of it seems to take place internally in the narrator's mind, so this is a story without much action, but it is thoughtful and elegantly told nonetheless. Interspersed with her thoughts and reflections are bits of medical history which at first seem a little incongruous and as if the author is wandering off a different storytelling path entirely.
The novel is separated into three sections and one interlude and the medical bits differ from each other yet upon further reflection they actually work quite nicely with the narrator's story enhancing it and shedding a kind of light on what is happening in her mind and in her life.
The story moves around in time so her reflections on events aren't strictly linear, but they eventually mesh into a cohesive story that is like a mosaic of colorful pieces creating one larger whole. I think ultimately this is a story of mothers and daughters, yet it is also a story about looking inside and seeing--not just literally but figuratively as well--seeing to understand.
The narrator, an unnamed woman going through some inner turmoil, is expecting her second child at the outset of the story. But the story goes back in time with her reflecting on meeting her partner, Johannes, and her struggle with the decision whether to have a child or not. She has just lost her mother to illness and is grieving for her, trying to put her life back in order. She reflects on her childhood and the summers she spent with her grandmother, her mother's mother, who was a psychoanalyst.
So these are some of the elements of her life that are swirling about, all of them world shifting--life and death, marriage and children, loss and new beginnings. Each life event quite momentous in its way. So it makes sense that the stories interwoven in the narrative, scientific medical shifts in world history offer a more cerebral reflection on the way we see the body and mind. Emotional disruptive events on one side and more thoughtful reasoning events on the other. They may feel a little incongruous at first but they are also complementary in their way, too.
Rontgen's work with the X-ray comes at the time she is dealing with the death of her mother. After all the upheaval of caring for her the narrator is left with time to fill and she spends hours in the library reading about Rontgen and the discovery that we can see inside the body.
"I began to believe that if I could see how these two events fitted together, the way that simultaneity tied them, then perhaps I might see also through the lens the fame on which my own life had been constructed, its underlying principle, or how it was that I should be considering motherhood when it seemed that I had barely altered from unhappy adolescence."
She was barely into her twenties when her mother fell ill and she had to turn all her attention to her mother. It is Freud and his daughter Anna who was also not just caregiver of sorts for her father but also his case study for his own work that sheds light on her relationship with her mother and particularly with her grandmother. As a child she would spend her summers with her and took to daily journaling (or her version of it) like her grandmother in order to try and outgrow her childhood. It is the last section that for me was the most evocative with John Hunter's medical experiments in human anatomy and his desire to perform a caesarean operation in the 1700s that paralleled so vividly the narrator's own pregnancy.
I wasn't quite sure about it as I was reading but now that I have finished it all seems to come together nicely as a whole and a different an unusual reading experience. How perfectly the medical stories peel back the skin and even look into the mind in a way that evokes in an almost visceral way the same introspection that the narrator is undergoing. What I found most relatable was the grief she felt at the start of the story. Greengrass captures so perfectly that feeling of being at swim when someone close is dying. After losing my own father last fall it really resonated with me in such a real and truthful way. I can see where this form of storytelling might not be for every reader, but It was a memorable read for me.