The Anatomist

London: Doubleday, 1998. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. A tight clean first edition/printing, protected in a new brodart wrapper, n ot price clipped/ex library or a book of the month edition. "O my America, my new-found-land!" Mateo Renaldo Colombo (or Columbus, to g ive him his English name) might have written in his De re anatomica. It is no accident that Federico Andahazi draws a parallel between his Renai ssance hero, the anatomist Mateo Colombo, and the explorer Christopher Colu mbus. It is the conceit of his first novel, The Anatomist (beautifully tran slated from the Spanish by Alberto Manguel), that both made "equally moment ous and disturbing" discoveries. Every schoolchild can tell you what Columb us's was; less well known, perhaps, is that of his countryman and fellow "e xplorer". "Mateo's America is less distant and infinitely smaller than Chri stopher's; in fact, it's not much larger than the head of a nail." In short , Mateo Renaldo Colombo discovered the Amor Veneris, the clitoris. Andahazi makes much of this discovery, not to mention its discoverer: "The discovery of Mateo Colombo's America was, all things considered, an epic counterpointed by an elegy. Mateo Colombo was as fierce and heartless as Christopher. Like Christopher (to use an appropriate metaphor) he was a brutal colonizer who claimed for himself all rights to the discovered land, the female body." Certainly women readers will view this description with at least as much irony as Native Americans regard that other "discovery" of a land they had known about all along.