The silence of the body

In The Silence of the Body, the Italian writer Guido Ceronetti trenchantly sifts through the miscellany of fact, legend, folk wisdom, and literary artifice by which cultures past and present have grappled with that most enigmatic of subjects, the human body. Long a student of ancient and classic writings, Ceronetti has culled their texts for the light they shed on the body's mysteries. He has indulged, too, his passion for the bizarre and his gift for sharp and memorable language. The result is a compendium of aphoristic opinions - erudite, outrageous, and cranky - through which Ceronetti seeks to "lift the veil from human things" in a way that doctors of medicine never will. The triumph of medicine and modernity, Ceronetti writes, has been to prolong life without providing wisdom, to break the silence of the body without hearing its voice. The one real illness left is our indifference to moral responsibility: the body "reveals itself only in peace and to philosophers." It is the considerable charm of this book to examine the body - literally, warts and all - and bring us one writer's quirky, challenging view.