Insane

by Rainald Goetz, Adrian Nathan West (Translator)

Overview

Translated for the first time into English, cult German author Rainald Goetz’s debut novel Insane draws upon his clinical psychiatric experience to paint a portrait of the asylum as a total institution. We follow a young psychiatrist, Dr Raspe, who enters the profession dreaming of revolutionising its methods. Confronted by day-to-day practices and the reality of life in the psychiatric hospital, Raspe begins to fray at the edges. The very concept of madness is called into question in a brutal portrayal of patients and psychiatrists and the various treatments administered, from psychotherapy to electroshock therapy. What is madness? And who is truly mad? Diving headlong into a terrifying and oppressive world, Insane is a veritable journey into the madhouse by one of Germany’s most prominent and contentious authors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910695326
Publisher:	Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication date:	10/18/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Rainald Goetz, born in 1954 in Munich, studied History and Medicine in Munich and obtained a doctoral degree in both subjects. He briefly worked as a doctor, but quit this profession for the sake of literature in his early thirties. His first novel, Insane, was published in 1983. In 1998, Goetz wrote the internet diary ‘Rubbish for Everyone’, probably the first literary blog in Germany, with entries on the world of media and consumerism. It was published in book form in 1999 and together with Rave, Jeff Koons, Celebration and Deconspiration belongs to This Morning, his great history of the present. Goetz has been awarded numerous prizes, most notably the Georg Büchner Prize in 2015. He lives in Berlin.

Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and translator of such authors as Pere Gimferrer, Juan Benet, Marianne Fritz, and Josef Winkler. His writings appear regularly in the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Literary Review. He lives in Spain and the United States with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.

Read an Excerpt

I recognized nothing.
Let loose from the madhouse, each day in the evening, I would walk to the tunnels of the U-bahn, not bothering to look around. Had I even caught the scent of spring? Still rattled from the journey, I made my way to my room, and nothing was as it had been before. I stepped oblivious among the beer cans, bottles, newspapers, and bits of clothing on the floor, questing aimlessly. The giant white sheets on the walls, behind the sheets the shelves, on the shelves the books, concealed. Had I read? Had I actually opened a book and heard something other than this pounding, this unbearable pounding in the ears, louder and louder with every phrase? Next to the bed lay the food scraps from the night before. I ate what I could, and fell into a dreamless sleep. I woke, it was already dark, and when I did, the unease was there. Get out of here now, go to the bars, outside. At night when I came back, stumbling and groping, I saw everything sharp and clear. The way the sneaker I kicked off had fallen, landing half on the bread plate. How odd, I thought, and all of the sudden, I came back to myself.
But the next morning there was nothing save that pain in my head and a quiver in my hands, and all around me was blindness, bereft of answers. So I set off on my way, back to the madhouse, far again from everything I’d known, into a constantly proliferating confusion.

After the usual wandering through the streets, back and forth on the sidewalk, pressed against the building walls, shop fronts, glass mirrors, aghast at the herds of people packed together in front of, behind, and around him, the ambush of the gazes, but at the same time commanded to be there among the people, in the midst of this back-and-forth, the 39-year-old programmer Sebastian Köhler crossed the broad stretch at one end of the sidewalk with free and easy steps, skipped forward under the linden trees of the opposing street to building 17, oh trusty façade, and with a bellowed HERE I AM set foot into the imposing edifice of the university psychiatric clinic, ready to hand himself over once more.

Editorial Reviews

‘Adrian Nathan West has managed an impressive translation of Mr Goetz’s voice – a relentless staccato that can border on the manic... This language accounts for a lot of what makes the book stick in the mind. ... [Goetz's] eloquent depictions of human misery, and his frustration with the seemingly impossible task of helping those who appear beyond help, continue to resonate.’
— The Economist

‘Rainald Goetz is the most important trendsetter in German literature.’
— Süddeutsche Zeitung

‘This book is a hammer.’
— Die Zeit

‘In many passages, Goetz achieves the same intensity and concentration of experience as in the disturbing early novels of Thomas Bernhard.’
— Süddeutsche Zeitung

‘Behind his nervous, tense willingness to experience, there is a broad education and a sensitive historical consciousness that endow his language with a balance of passionate expressiveness, observational coolness and satirical clarity.’
— The German Academy of Language and Literature, on the occasion of the awarding of the 2015 Georg Büchner Prize

‘Many of his texts should come with an epilepsy warning.’
— Die Zeit

From the Publisher