Andre, hun, with all the love in the world, have you considered therapy?

I really thought that after Proust, the texts would get significantly more comprehensible. Wrong. I can’t even articulate my thoughts through the entire beginning of the text on here because it includes so much profanity. It’s entirely possible that I’m missing something because where does the whole play from the start come into relevance? I mean he was like “the girl is coerced into lying to her grandmother to stay at the boarding school… fast forward, the girl’s mangled body tumbled out of the cabinet” and that was the end of it? Don’t get me wrong, it left an impression, but also… what? Unless it was to introduce the absolute insanity that permeated the rest, I don’t understand. It felt like only the middle made partial sense and even then it felt very achronological.

Admittedly, I’m kind of unsure who the crazy(-est?) one is in this relationship: Nadja, Andre, or both, because wow there is so much wrong here. Nadja kind of comes across like she’s half-living in another world, she reminds me of a more aggressive Luna Lovegood (if that makes sense). I’m not sure whether she’s supposed to be connected to some sort of witchcraft or just genuinely mentally unwell, but that certainly was a ride to get through. I would have gotten sick of her so quickly, which makes me think that Andre must have some kind of residual trauma going on, because genuinely what was wrong with him? Sir, you are married.

That being said, the text introduces some interesting questions and concepts. Right from the beginning is the introduction of “Who am I?”, which has its own set of interesting philisophical implications, albeit relatively common. Instead, an aspect that really stood out to me was the idea of ‘is it possible to truly know who others are?’. The quote “as a dream about someone resembles that person in reality. It is, and at the same time is not, the same person; a slight and mysterious transfiguration is apparent in the features” intrigues me because it begs the question of, since we can only interpret a person through our own lens, can we can ever truly see someone as anything other than a distorted version of themselves? Could we ever know?

Another thing that really caught my attention was comments about the difficulty of psychiatric release, even if no longer necessary. It reminded me of an experiment done in the 1970s, where participants falsified a single symptom to get institutionalized, but upon arrival dropped it to see whether psychiatrists would be able to differentiate ‘insanity’. Not only were participants not released, but their behaviour was considered ‘symptoms of illness’ and resulted in further diagnosis of either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Only after ‘admitting’ to being sick and ‘taking’ medication, were they released, not for realization of stability or error, but because the psychiatrists thought they were currently asymptomatic enough. The fact that this book brings up the same issues as a study from 50 years later is a concern.