A welcome corrective to romanticized notions of mental illness, written with compassion and authenticity.
In her debut novel, Danish writer Gråbøl paints a portrait of a young woman living in state-sponsored housing in Copenhagen struggling with both mental illness and its treatments.
Before the relative independence of the residential facility, our narrator was locked in the psychiatric ward of a hospital and subjected to repeated electroconvulsive therapy. She’s determined never to be sent there again. Now she has her own fifth-floor room along with other young adults, among them Hector, from Peru, where his psychoses were treated with exorcism. Their housing is intended to be temporary, an “impermanent halfway house,” “a practice home.” Together with the support staff, she and Hector and the others cook communal meals, take excursions, shop at the grocery store. The outside world seems hard to fathom; the world of the facility is deeply familiar: “We know what sort of diagnosis a person’s got even before they’ve mentioned it: boys are schizotypal, girls are borderline or obsessive-compulsive. Eating disorders are easily spotted. The grammar of the ill is gendered, but also a matter of economics….” Our insomniac narrator wants to learn how to sleep; no one can help her with that. Her diagnosis is borderline—“but between what and what?” Like all of them, she struggles with shame, weight gain, side effects, hopelessness. She self-harms, though never enough to require hospitalization. Gråbøl’s eye is unsparing and convincing, her prose vivid and alive. “Something uncontrollable stirs in me, it rises from my calves, as if I was a bottle and someone poured acid into me….” The narrator doesn’t deny that she needs help. “The days were as signs drawn by hands in the air; depictions of knots or loops.” But at the same time, she has questions: “Why doesn’t anyone wonder about the line between trauma and treatment?...about the relationship between compulsion and compliance?...care and abuse?...between surrender and obliteration?”
A welcome corrective to romanticized notions of mental illness, written with compassion and authenticity.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781953861849
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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