Insane

In his legendary, audacious first novel, originally published in 1983, Rainald Goetz writes about psychiatry and about a hero of our time. What is the pain of the insanity of the insane? How difficult is the work of doctors in psychiatric clinics? What is life like there? Does it have to be so torn, so mangled?

»I could recognize nothing. Set free from the institution, every day in the evening, I went through the tunnels of the subway, without looking around. Had I even smelled the springtime? Rattled by the journey, I made it to my room, and nothing was as it had been before. Unbothered, I moved among the beer cans, bottles, newspapers, and bits of clothing on the floor, a fruitless quest. The giant white sheets on the walls, behind the sheets the shelves, on the shelves the books, embargoed. Had I read? Had I really opened a book and heard something other than this pounding, this unbearable pounding in the ears, growing louder with each sentence.«

»[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

»Through radical shifts in narrators, subjects and references to culture, Goetz creates a post modern montage, a shattered book mapping a shattered soul. [...] and while the sampling and snippeting might seem old hat to us today, Goetz’s book has a profound advantage over contemporary novels of this style: a painful and beautiful, at times vindicating and always truly felt lyricism that shines a light into the grey cosmos of Raspe’s mind…« Jan Wilm, Times Literary Supplement

»Foucault stalks the novel’s corridors, informing the reflections on control and normativity, the construction of treatment as carceral, punitive, ultimately unavailing. [...] If Goetz’s experience can teach us anything, even a generation on, it is to query psychiatry’s apparent resignation at its own failures.« Literary Review

»[R]eaders ... will find brilliant, treasurable moments of clarity amongst all the detritus of the mind.« Publishers Weekly, starred review

»This book is a tour de force.« 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

»As a hyper-nervous virtuoso of attentiveness, Rainald Goetz works in the field between authenticity and fiction.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Praise is bad.« Rainald Goetz