MARS

by Fritz Zorn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 1981

Does bourgeois, capitalist Victorianism cause cancer? That's more or less what Wilhelm Reich believed. And so did Fritz Zorn--the pseudonymous (""Zorn"" means anger) Zurich man who wrote this self-analysis-cum-tract before dying of malignant lymphoma in 1976, age 32. True, Zorn's own case of bourgeois strait-jacketing was an extreme one. As we learn in repetitious, droning detail here, he grew up the son of rich, puritanical, obsessively respectable Zurich parents (""My parents are my cancer. . .""). Without really being aware of it, he thus became a severe neurotic: asexual, unable to laugh or love, as he went his respectable way through Gymnasium and university. And though he suffered from depression, loneliness, and a ""permanent sexual inferiority complex,"" he woke up to the reality of his psychic illness only when it seemed to explode in physical form: a tumor in his neck--an ""accumulation of swallowed tears."" So Zorn then began painful psychotherapy in earnest, began understanding the ""evil"" in his upbringing, glad to be enlightened (""getting cancer was the best idea I have ever had""), becoming increasingly didactic and angry as the disease worsened. But, while Zorn's situation itself is sometimes affecting--especially his race to cure the psychic illness before the physical one kills him--the simplistic, rhetorical insistence on the totally psychosomatic nature of his cancer becomes dreary (""I'm in a concentration camp now, and I am being gassed to death by the 'parental' legacy inside me""); one is always aware, too, that this neurotic-young-man-that-was is still a very neurotic young man as he writes--in what seems to be only an early stage of psychotherapeutic ""cure."" And if Zorn's perception of his own case is half-persuasive at best (even the etiology of the neurosis is unconvincing), his many attempts at socio-political generalization are far weaker: he believes that his parents ""were just a little bit more reprehensible that other reprehensible parents from the same bourgeois circles""; and so ""I have fallen ill from the same causes that are making everyone in our society more or less ill."" This then, is less an intellectual document to stand against Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor than a clinical one: the way in which one very atypical (and sporadically eloquent) cancer patient reacted to his illness. And though the book has value on those limited terms, it's not likely to change many minds about cancer's origins (probably every American reader can think of at least one earthy, well-adjusted, un-bourgeois cancer victim). . . nor to engage an audience in the personal way that Stephani Cook's somewhat similar Second Life (p. 847) does.

Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1981

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1981

Categories: NONFICTION