An intense, immersive reading experience that provides real insight into those afflicted with severe mental illness.
A highly detailed, emotional plunge into the mind of a disturbed man.
Englishman Pheby’s (Grace, 2009) unique second novel draws on a famous psychiatric case from the 19th century for its main character, Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge of the High Court of Saxony. In 1903, Schreber wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which became a subject of interest to other novelists as well as Sigmund Freud. Pheby’s novel picks up Schreber’s story later, when he suffers a third bout of mental illness. There are echoes of Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” and Franz Kafka’s nightmarish writings. Writing in the third person in a semi–stream of consciousness manner, Pheby invites us to enter deep into Schreber’s mind as he experiences frustrations, delusions, and fantasies. The novel opens with Schreber frantically searching his house for his wife, Sabine. He finds her on the floor; she’s had a seizure: “What was this? This panting thing? Moaning...grinning mannequin...his wife’s form, but without her soul.” He leaves the house and wanders around, encountering various people on the streets. His daughter, Fridoline, tries to get him to come back; he refuses. He then finds himself in a hospital under the care of Müller, an orderly, and Dr. Rössler, who has read Schreber’s memoir. Pheby meticulously chronicles Schreber’s treatment and his recurring nightmares and tortuous memories of his strict father, who probably mistreated his children. Schreber ruminates on religion—was he a mere “plaything of the Lower God?” A mysterious Jewish gentleman, who may or may not be real, haunts him. Schreber is the book’s sole focus, always front and center, but that center is askew.
An intense, immersive reading experience that provides real insight into those afflicted with severe mental illness.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77196-172-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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