There is a World Elsewhere: Autobiographical Pages

Like his popular essay collections (Notes of an Anatomist), pathologist Gonzalez-Crussi's entrancing autobiographical memoir beguiles with its elegant, precise prose, its passionate philosophizing and its fusion of medicine and metaphysics. Beginning with his childhood in a Mexican barrio, where his father, an alcoholic landlord, lost the family's fortune in rash, impractical business schemes, and ending with his liberating move to the U.S. to intern in a Colorado hospital, Gonzalez-Crussi's uncanny self-portrait revolves around the question of why he became a doctor, particularly a pathologist, one whose job is to ascertain causes of death. While there is no definitive answer, several formative experiences were crucial: working in his parents' makeshift drugstore purveying a mix of quackery and pharmaceuticals; a friend's tragic drowning; and a neighbor's pointless death in a brawl while searching bars for Gonzalez-Crussi's errant father--events that early implanted a keen, guilt-tinged awareness of death. With wit, dark irony and erudition lightly worn, Gonzalez-Crussi, now professor of pathology at Northwestern University Medical School, sprinkles his reminiscences with multiple references to Cervantes, Zola, Cicero, Baudelaire, Buddhist texts, Titian, Hogarth, as he meditates on the nature of memory, whether a fetus has consciousness, the interplay of chance and free will, erotic passion. Gonzalez-Crussi writes with the old-fashioned eloquence of Stendahl, but in a manner thoroughly informed by the modern age's existential anxiety, making his death-haunted autobiography challenging and a pleasure to read. Editor, Julie Grau. (Sept.)