March 15, 2024
In her debut novel, Danish writer Gr�b�l 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. Gr�b�l'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.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
July 22, 2024
Poet Gråbøl makes her English-language debut with this striking chronicle of a young woman’s treatment for severe depression. The unnamed narrator arrived in a Copenhagen psychiatric care center some years ago following a course of electroconvulsive therapy, and lives on a floor designated for temporary residents. They’re permitted to come and go as they please, and they cope with their conditions by cooking together, taking up boxing, watching movies, and forming a cover band. The novel is composed of short, journal-like entries that range from slice-of-life vignettes about other residents, like the angry Waheed, who regularly blasts 50 Cent in his room, to elliptical impressions of the narrator’s mental state (“I sometimes wake up and realize that what’s going to happen has no name”). Most evocative are Gråbøl’s descriptions of ECT, which the narrator reflects on with ambivalence (“There was something both disturbing and fantastic about being wiped clean like that”). The narrator is also unsure about her future as she deals with the difficult reality of the present, a state of mind she expresses poignantly (“Those of us with no place to live and no place to die end up in this trial home, this impermanent halfway house”). Readers of Janet Frame ought to take note.