Karen Lazar’s Hemispheres Launched at the Book Lounge

by Colleen on May 10th, 2011

A good turnout of readers and friends enjoyed the launch of Hemispheres: Inside a stroke by Karen Lazar at the Book Lounge last week.

Orenna Krut, a long time friend, and MD of Pearson SA Schools, introduced the author before entering into dialogue with her. She described the book as an “astonishing work, so beautifully written”. She said, “Karen has a way of using words in a very suprising way, extraordinary words, or ordinary ones used in a new way. This book is a lot like poetry, condensed and distilled, beautifully put.”

Orenna described living through the experience of Karen’s stroke and recovery as a part of her own history. “It’s like looking at a photograph of an event which you know you attended, but you’re just outside the frame, looking in.”

Karen read several poignant vignettes outlining the harrowing experiences she encountered along the way, including the book’s title piece, ‘Hemispheres’, where she is talking to 300 English teachers, teaching Shakespearean comedy, feeling almost secure in the familiar territory, when she first discovers something has gone profoundly awry with her perception:

“Something palpable but impalpable is wrong with my relationship with the class. I can’t tell whether it’s a lack or a blockage of some kind. Or both. This has never happened before. ‘Excuse me for a moment, please,’ I say. The teachers are watching me quizzically but sympathetically, murmuring amongst themselves. I feel naked.”

As she relearns to apprehend the world spatially in its totality, she finds the missing hemisphere and reclaims her self-regulation and with it a sense of herself as whole. Never mawkish or sentimental, the prose keenly observes both the indignities and compassionate gestures inside the hospital and rehab centres.

Written in short flash-fictionesque sections, the author presents the story of her post-stroke life in clusters of “fragments”, which mirror her neurological perception and echo the recollection of memory, skills and always, her unfailing graciousness and dark humour.

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