An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

One of the books I took to the Peak District was An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) by Oliver Sacks – a copy I bought in Washington DC, and thus one of those lovely floopy-floppy US paperbacks, rather than the stiffer UK ones. I’ve written about quite a lot of Sacks books over the years, and he’s one of my favourite writers (and people – though of course I didn’t know him personally). He’s certainly my favourite non-fiction writer – and that’s why it’s a bit of a shame that I didn’t love An Anthropologist on Mars quite as much as some of the others. It’s not where I’d recommend to start.

The themes and approach in this book aren’t wildly different from many of his others – it was perhaps the structure and specific topics that left me a little cold, but I’ll come on to that later. Sacks divides the book into seven sections, each concerned with a different patient and Sacks’ diagnosis and study of their lives. Rather than summarise them all myself, I’m going to shamelessly plagiarise the Wikipedia entry:

• The Case of the Colourblind Painter discusses an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia, or the inability to perceive colour, due to brain damage.
• The Last Hippie describes the case of a man suffering from the effects of a massive brain tumor, including anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from remembering anything that has happened since the late 1960s.
• A Surgeon’s Life describes Sacks’ interactions with Dr. Carl Bennett, a surgeon and amateur pilot with Tourette syndrome. The surgeon is often beset by tics, but these tics vanish when he is operating.
• To See and Not See is the tale of Shirl Jennings, a man who was blind from early childhood, but was able to recover some of his sight after surgery. This is one of an extremely small number of cases where an individual regained sight lost at such an early age, and as with many of the other cases, the patient found the experience to be deeply disturbing.
• The Landscape of His Dreams discusses Sacks’ interactions with Franco Magnani, an artist obsessed with his home village of Pontito in Tuscany. Although Magnani has not seen his village in many years, he has constructed a detailed, highly accurate, three-dimensional model of Pontito in his head.
• Prodigies describes Sacks’ relationship with Stephen Wiltshire, a young autistic savant described by Hugh Casson as “possibly the best child artist in Britain”.
• An Anthropologist on Mars describes Sacks’ meeting with Temple Grandin, a woman with autism who is a world-renowned designer of humane livestock facilities and a professor at Colorado State University.

As you can see, the title of the collection comes from the final essay – it is how Grandin describes her interaction with the world, while trying to comprehend social mores. I have a thing about titles – they’re often so important in how we understand a book – and was a bit annoyed that this collection took a comment by Grandin and made it seem as though Sacks were the anthropologist in question.

I’ll start with the positives – the chapter ‘To See and Not See’ was completely fascinating. Jennings, the patient, technically has the ability to see – but since he cannot remember ever seeing before, he has no concept of what sight is. Having lived for decades without seeing, he cannot understand the idea of visual distance, or representation (paintings mean nothing to him). Sacks explores how our comprehension of sight creates a world around us – and the very human reaction when someone is expected to understand their world in a fundamentally different way. The footnotes lead to various useful precedents, and it’s an extremely well put together chapter.

Indeed, the first three chapters before this were also good – though not with quite the same philosophical and psychological interest for me. Sacks is very humane and empathetic in portraying (in the first chapter) a painter who can no longer see colour – recognising not just the scientific elements of this, but the enormous changes and challenges the painter must face in ways that non-artistic people wouldn’t. On the flip side, Sacks writes with admiration of Bennett, the surgeon with Tourette’s – awed by how he maintains his professional life.

The final three chapters were less interesting topics to me (though it’s very possible that you’d find them fascinating, if they happen to be areas of interest to you). But there were problems there that existed even in the chapters I found up my street – everything is slightly too drawn out, and without the pacing of Sacks’ best work. He lingers just that little too long on every insight, not deepening our relationship with the patient, but slowing its progress down. There are fewer tangential details and anecdotes than in other of his books, too, and it’s impossible not to wonder if this was largely a collection of things that didn’t make it into The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

It’s still Sacks, so I still liked it – if it had been the first book I’d read by him, I’m sure I’d have loved it – but it was a little bit of a disappointment after reading some of Sacks’ brilliant, brilliant work. If you’ve yet to read anything by him, head to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Hallucinations instead.