The Book About Blanche and Marie (2006)

Acclaimed Swedish novelist Per Olov Enquist clearly relishes blurring, erasing, and redrawing historical figures with his poetic brand of fact-based fiction. While sketching the intense friendship between two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie and late-19th-century hysteria patient Blanche Wittman, he celebrates the tension between fact and artistic license. At one point, Blanche observes, ''I learned not to regard factual events as metaphorical. Something is what is. Nothing else.'' Yet Enquist constantly contradicts this statement in Blanche and Marie, an exhilaratingly brisk text (translated by Tiina Nunnally), crafting a sublime allegory that correlates his heroines' grievous romantic afflictions (''[H]e who touches Marie touches death'') with radiation (Curie's medical breakthrough, which was a cause of both ladies' demise). Much like his fascinating subjects, Enquist cannot crack the heart's mysterious scientific code, but his novel still throbs with a vigorous pulse.