The anatomy lesson
Subtitle: a novel
By: Nina Siegal
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 271
ISBN-13: 9780385538367
Subjects: Fiction; Social conditions; Medical fiction; FICTION / Literary; FICTION / Historical; FICTION / Medical
Description: "Set in seventeenth-century Holland, an engrossing historical novel  that brilliantly imagines the complex story behind one of Rembrandt's  most famous paintings  commissioned by a prominent Amsterdam medical guild, The Anatomical Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp was one of Rembrandt's first paintings to gain public notice. The novel  opens on the morning of the medical dissection, and, as they prepare  for that evening's big event, it follows several characters: a  one-handed coat thief called Aris the Kid, who is awaiting his turn at  the gallows; the twenty-six-year-old Dutch master himself, who feels a  shade uneasy about this assignment; Jan Fetchet, a curio collector who  also moonlights as an acquirer of medical cadavers; Flora, the woman  pregnant with Aris's child, who hopes to collect her lover's body for a  Christian burial before it's too late; Rene Descartes, who attended the  dissection in the course of his quest to understand where the human soul  resides; and Pia, a contemporary art historian who is examining the  painting in the future. As the story builds to its dramatic and  inevitable conclusion, the events that transpire throughout the day sway  Rembrandt to change his initial composition in a fundamental way.  Bringing to life the vivid world of Amsterdam in 1632, The Anatomy Lesson offers a rich slice of history and a textured story by a masterful young writer"--