Frigyes Karinthy:

The distinguished Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy was sitting in a Budapest café, wondering whether to write a long-planned monograph on modern man or a new play, when he was disturbed by the roaring—so loud as to drown out all other noises—of a passing train. Soon it was gone, only to be succeeded by another. And another. Strange, Karinthy thought, it had been years since Budapest had streetcars. Only then did he realize he was suffering from an auditory hallucination of extraordinary intensity.

What in fact Karinthy was suffering from was a brain tumor, not cancerous but hardly benign, though it was only much later—after spells of giddiness, fainting fits, friends remarking that his handwriting had altered, and books going blank before his eyes—that he consulted a doctor and embarked on a series of examinations that would lead to brain surgery. Karinthy’s description of his descent into illness and his observations of his symptoms, thoughts, and feelings, as well as of his friends’ and doctors’ varied responses to his predicament, are exact and engrossing and entirely free of self-pity. A Journey Round My Skull is not only an extraordinary piece of medical testimony, but a powerful work of literature—one that dances brilliantly on the edge of extinction.

There is plenty of praise for this classic book ...

... to my mind, a masterpiece ... remarkable ... extraordinary ... unusual and extremely interesting ... terrible and marvelous ... a book of surpassing interest and power ...

With an introduction by Oliver Sacks.

From the archive:

“You know, dear,” I said to him one day, about two months after the stroke, when he was feeling mighty low, “maybe you want to write the first aphasic memoir.” He smiled broadly, said, “Good idea! Mem, mem, mem.” And so he began dictating, sometimes with mountain-moving effort, and at others sailing along at a good clip, an account of what he’d just gone through, what the mental world of aphasia felt and looked like.

A Journey Round My Skull