An admirably daring account of psychosis, but one that’s too disjointed to sustain interest.
Harnisch’s (Porcelain Utopia, 2016, etc) unconventional work of fiction documents its protagonist’s chronic mental illness.
Benjamin J. Schreiber, recently out of rehab, lives a life of arrant dissipation, lost in a world of alcohol and drugs. He documents his life and obsessions in his journal, The Secret Sex Diaries of Benjamin J Schreiber. Sometimes, Benjamin writes in the first person, other times in the third, describing the frantically lascivious exploits of his alter ego, Georgie. Other times, the narrative unfolds in the form of correspondence between Benjamin and this therapist, nebulously named “Dr. C.” Georgie meets (or, maybe, he conjures) Claudia, a sultry sexpot who becomes his sexual companion, wife, muse, and perpetual source of angst. At one point, they’re married and live in a sprawling mansion; at another, Claudia is his older, French inamorata, and they rob banks together. Harnisch announces in a prefatory note that the book is composed in a nonlinear fashion as a series of Benjamin’s potentially hallucinatory imaginings. However, this note is unnecessary and even condescending, as none of the competing storylines seem plausible enough (or are delivered sedately enough) to be other than fantastical. Also, the prose is, at best, uneven: “ ‘Photograph me, Georgie,’ she whispers. ‘Picture me. Print me. Capture me and keep me in your memory. I just love, love, love pictures. Take more pictures of me. Please, please, please, Georgie-boo-boo!’ ” Eventually, after a tragedy, Georgie desperately attempts to keep his memories alive by constructing a wax museum. The author is to be commended for considerable ambition, as it takes some audacity to thoroughly dispense with the traditional structure of the novel to more palpably represent Benjamin’s profound illness. However, Benjamin is the only character that’s given even a hint of depth, and readers’ only access to him is through his maniacal reveries. The book’s principal defect isn’t merely that it’s hard to follow, but that it’s impossible for readers to care enough to make the effort worthwhile.
An admirably daring account of psychosis, but one that’s too disjointed to sustain interest.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5238-7084-4
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An East German psychotherapist explores, in an occasionally affecting way, the experience of living within a totalitarian system. It was a system in which a citizen had to guard his utterances not only outside but inside the home, because parents could not speak too freely in front of children, who might themselves be indiscreet or inadvertently betray them. The individual was required not merely to conform but to show enthusiasm for the system. It was not possible, Maaz writes, ``to escape this personality deformation.'' The East German system used overt force, including torture and arrest, as well as the indirect force of legal insecurity, reprisals, intimidation, indoctrination, and fear. It required one to ``sacrifice emotional spontaneity, all frankness and honesty, as well as [one's] critical faculty,'' even to preserve a ``relatively safe life of subservience.'' Few were able to resist the pressure. Millions participated regularly in huge ``jubilation marches,'' and an estimated half a million citizens were informants of the Stasi, the secret police. It was little wonder that the capacity for independent thought and action became increasingly rare. In describing this process, Maaz is persuasive and, in a book published originally in 1990 in Germany, prescient regarding the difficulties that East Germans would face in adjusting to democracy. When dealing with the more theoretical foundations of a controlled psychological environment he is less convincing, as when he complains about the authoritarian technique of ``forcing children to sit on the potty''; he is even self- contradictory when, discussing his therapeutic work with patients, he describes the act of emigration from East Germany as a ``sadomasochistic defense of their dammed-up aggression.'' And when he fears for a new economic expansion that will ``exacerbate the ecological crisis'' and ``step up the armaments business,'' he is venturing beyond his area of expertise. Like the curate's egg, good in parts.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03364-3
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
A courageous, often profound, and extraordinary attempt by one of England's best historians to cut through the pessimism and parochialism of the profession and to find the bonds of humanity underlying its conventional divisions. Zeldin (History/Oxford Univ.; The French, 1983, etc.) ranges with prodigious learning over different civilizations and epochs, dealing with subjects as disparate as why men and women find it difficult to talk to one another and why political scientists have misunderstood the animal kingdom. His method is anything but academic: He starts most chapters with an interview or description of a person, usually French and usually a woman (``because many women seem to me to be looking at life with fresh eyes'') before broadening the discussion to analyze the nature of the concerns expressed, their historical origins, and the ways in which different civilizations have dealt with them. In doing so, he raises some questions shunned by the academic world and asks others more likely to be raised in magazines and self-help books: ``Is it inevitable,'' he asks, ``that as women become increasingly adventurous and have ever higher expectations of life, they will find men less and less adequate?'' Why are humans ``still so awkward...with even 40 per cent of Americans...complaining that they are too shy to speak freely?'' In answering questions like this, he repeatedly produces the unusual fact or the revisionist view: Writing of Islamic societies, for instance, he notes that sociability, not war, is considered the defining element of the good life. Ultimately, this is a call for a sense of the richness of life and for optimism, which he defines as ``awareness that despite nastiness and stupidity, there is something else too. Pessimism is resignation, an inability to find a way out.'' Not always as skeptical as he might be (Stalin and Hitler, he says, ``remained desperately hungry for respect''), but no short review can do justice to the richness, humor, humanity, and range of this important book.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017160-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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