The Vitals
By Tracy Sorensen
Picador, 2023, ISBN: 9781761261626, 304 pp., $34.99

The Vitals, a cancer survivor’s tale, is by turns witty, insightful and terrifying.

It tells the story of Tracy Sorensen’s close encounter with cancer, but not from her point of view. The narrators are her internal organs, each with its own anthropomorphic personality, trying to make sense of the new growths that have appeared in their midst.

As Sorensen told Red Ant, she deliberately set out to write a different kind of cancer chronicle. Instead of placing herself at the centre of the narrative she made herself peripheral.

The Vitals is “deliberately working against the cancer memoir,” she said. She is working from a “more radical point of view, that’s more ecological”.

Sorensen believes that we, as individuals are never “the centre of what’s going on”. What is presented in The Vitals is that the human body is more or less “a cobbled together thing”.

Among the personalities in the book there is the spleen, known as Rage. He is a vehemently ultra-left, post-structuralist Marxist who runs his own bar where he carries on about French philosophers.

Ute, the uterus drives around the imaginative landscape of Tracy’s body (which is the image of the Australian outback) with her two kelpie dogs (the ovaries) in the tray of her ute.

Gaster, the stomach is forever on the lookout for food, which he passes on to Folderol, the small intestine and Col, the colon who manage the digestion and elimination.

There is a lot of room in the writing for sharp social observation among the surrealism.

But the arrival of Baby, the tumour and her offspring, Bunny slowly brings fear to the reader. How can the organs warn “the Assemblage” (Tracy) about the danger they are all in?

The novel was written under a Writer in Residence program of the Charles Perkins Centre at Sydney University, which is a multidisciplinary research centre committed to improving global health. So, there is plenty of high-grade scientific information in these pages.

The Vitals celebrates the agency of life in all its forms and takes as its starting-point that all life, from the single-cellular to the humpback whale, is embedded in an ecosystem which is in turn part of the one and only biosphere we have ever known.

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Red Ant interviewed the author about her book on July 31st, 2023 (see below).