Frost - Opening

First Day

A medical internship consists of more than spectating at complicated bowel operations, cutting open stomach linings, bracketing off lungs, and sawing off feet; and it doesn't just consist of thumbing closed the eyes of the dead, and hauling babies out into the world either. An internship is not just tossing limbs and parts of limbs over your shoulder into an enamel bucket.

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JANUARY 2008

Translation copyright 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,

a division of Random House, Inc. New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in German as Frost by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, Germany, 1963. Copyright Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1963. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United State by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, either are the products of the authors's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

FROST