Translated by Linda Asher
Bruno Sachs is a country doctor who makes house calls and feels deeply for his patients. There are broken bones, unwanted pregnancies, people without the will to live, a friend dying of cancer. His pity for his fellow creatures is both his motivating force and his own untreatable condition. Among the deaths, love affairs, and small town gossip, a love story emerges at the heart of the novel—between Dr. Sachs and a young woman upon whom he once performed an abortion.
The Case of Dr. Sachs is a novel of the doctor's life that recalls Chekhov's Ward Number Six for its rendering of the central character's misericordia. Written in the second person,The Case of Doctor Sachs is filled with voices of silent suffering and arias of quiet joy. In France, where The Case of Doctor Sachs sold more than 600,000 copies and was awarded the Prix du Livre Inter, Martin Winckler's novel has come to represent a new freedom of literary expression.
Linda Asher in her Manhattan apartment. Photo by Bryan Schutmaat.
Remembering Linda Asher
(November 27, 1932 - September 15, 2026)
A friend of Seven Stories, the descerning and hugely talented French translator Linda Asher, died last Tuesday. Linda Asher (November 27, 1932 - September 15, 2026) helped us bring several astonishing and challenging novels into superlative English editions—Yasmina Reza's Babylon, the marvelous late 19th and early 20th century French bestseller Jean-Marie Déguignet's Memoirs of a Breton Peasant, and Martin Winckler's (pseudonym for Marc Zaffran) The Case of Doctor Sachs. Linda also translated Balzac, Simenon, Victor Hugo, Kundera and others. In her previous life as longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, she worked with Murakami, Louise Erdrich, Beckett and A.S. Byatt among others. She will be missed.
We encourage those with photos and memories and memories to share to email LindaAsherStories@gmail.com.
Martin Winckler (pen name of Marc Zaffran) was born in Algiers in 1955. His family moved from there to Israel and then, in 1962, to France. Winckler obtained his medical degree in 1982 and opened his own office as general practitioner in 1983. He also worked part-time at a women’s health center for family planning. His first novel, The Case of Dr. Sachs (La Maladie de Sachs) was released in France in 1998 and became a surprise bestseller, with sales in excess of 600,000 copies. Winckler lives in a small city in provincial France.