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    The Man Who Walked Away
    The Man Who Walked Away
    The Man Who Walked Away
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Man Who Walked Away

    Written by Maud Casey

    Narrated by George Guidall

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Publisher Marketing: In a trance-like state, Albert walks--from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia--all over Europe. When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he's left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images.Loosely based on the case history of Albert Dadas, a psychiatric patient in the hospital of St. Andre in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, "The Man Who Walked""Away" imagines Albert's wanderings and the anguish that caused him to seek treatment with a doctor who would create a diagnosis for him, a narrative for his pain. In a time when mental health diagnosis is still as much art as science, Maud Casey takes us back to its tentative beginnings and offers us an intimate relationship between one doctor and his patient as, together, they attempt to reassemble a lost life. Through Albert she gives us a portrait of a man untethered from place and time who, in spite of himself, kept setting out, again and again, in search of wonder and astonishment.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 11, 2014
    ISBN9781490618913
    The Man Who Walked Away
    Author

    Maud Casey

    Maud Casey stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. Casey received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Arizona. She lives in Washington, DC and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland.

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    • 5/5
      Albert has had a compulsion to walk since the age of thirteen. He has traversed most of Europe, has been arrested for vagrancy, has enlisted, then deserted, the army, yet, he has only fleeting and fragmentary memories of these journeys and events. Finally, a lamplighter, aware of Albert’s compulsion, takes him to the hospital of St . Andre in Bordeaux, once an abbey, now a Psychiatric Hospital. The unnamed Doctor develops his own obsession with Albert, promising that he won’t let him walk away again and, in the hospital, Albert feels that he can finally rest, that he will finally develop ties to the world of time, place, and memory just as his father had, before he died, tied Albert to his bed to make him stay, not out of cruelty but out of love and longing to keep his son at home. The Man Who Walked Away is loosely based on the real case of Albert Dadas in the late 19th c at a time when psychiatry was still more art than science. Throughout the book, author Maud Casey shows the exploitation often visited on patients, brought out to ‘perform’ before other doctors, seemingly more for entertainment than for teaching purposes. The Doctor is fascinated by these patients, mostly women, who are diagnosed as hysterics. But he wishes to understand, not to exploit and his patients are treated with respect and acceptance of their various illnesses. The patients of the asylum are a wonderfully eccentric group and the staff are likable but it is Albert who moves this story with his vulnerability, his sense of loss, and his desire to please and be loved, but mostly in his desire to find a place and people who will never let him go. Casey intertwines fact with fairy tale and, in so doing, she has created not only a marvelous narrative of the early days of Psychiatry but also a beautiful and haunting tale about the human need for memories and stories to tether us to time and place, how grief can cause us to become unmoored, and how kindness and compassion can bring us back again. This is not the kind of story to be consumed all in one sitting; it is slow, quiet, lyrical and thoughtful but ultimately satisfying for that reader who appreciates that sometimes the best stories, like music, are found, not in the movements but in the pauses between them.