Reviews

This book is beautifully written and heartbreaking. It took me a while to get into it, but once I found my footing in the prose, I was moved. It made me simultaneously want to keep reading but want to stop because I was afraid of what I would read next. This book isn't for the faint of heart.

jenni8fer's review against another edition

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5.0

A fictionalized account of the actual case of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), a distinguished judge in Leipzig, Germany, who developed paranoid psychosis in mid-life and was committed to a mental asylum on three different occasions. The final time in his retirement years of which he never returned home again, passing away in the asylum. Daniel Paul Schreber wrote and published Memoirs of My Nervous Illness where he discussed his bouts with mental illness. Schreber's book was influential to Sigmund Freud as a case study. Freud dubbed the illness 'paranoid schizophrenia' and referenced Schreber's repressed homosexual desires.

Dark, intense, exquisite. Alex Pheby places the reader inside the mind of Daniel Paul Schreber, giving the reader the perspective of an unreliable narrator. The story takes place in Schreber's later years as a retired judge. His time in the asylum will be his last.

anxiousbookclub's review

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challenging slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Content Warnings

angelayoung's review

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3.0

I'm not politically engaged enough to have properly grasped the unearthing of the roots of the 'psychological structure of fascism' that other reviewers have suggested underpins this novel, but I am humanly and psychologically engaged and I found this deconstruction and disintegration of a human mind fascinating and horrifying. (And because Fascism, or any starkly imposed ism, can cause the mass deconstruction of human minds and attitudes, then I do understand the analogy other reviewers have drawn.)

This novel is based on the life of a German judge called Daniel Paul Schreber (whose name is unchanged in the novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Paul_Schreber. Schreber lived between 1842-1911 and suffered three mental breakdowns. When he recovered from the second one he wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness which was published in 1903. Freud read Schreber's Memoirs and thought Schreber should be appointed director of a mental hospital. Alex Pheby has turned Schreber's experiences into this novel.

Playthings is a disturbing fictionalisation of Schreber's mental disintegration, accompanied by his hallucinatory Jew (as he calls him) whose name is Alexander Zilberschlag (I can't help thinking that because these names mean defender and silversmith, perhaps they also mean ally and alchemist?) and I found the passages between Schreber and Zilbershlag the most compelling. Schreber thought he was turning into a woman and although - in the novel - this wasn't abundantly clear, at least it wasn't to me, there is a searing scene that suggests this delusion began at a very young age.

The other wonderful thing about this book is that it's published by Galley Beggar Press (in the UK) whose strapline is: 'A collection of quality new, contemporary and classic fiction from the British Isles'. Their existence, and the books they publish, are very good things indeed.

arirang's review

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4.0

Disturbed by an unexpected illness, retired Senatspräsident of the High Court of Saxony, Daniel Paul Schreber, last of the great Schreber line, suffers the return of feelings and thoughts he has long kept in check.

Each chapter of Playthings opens with a scene setting title paragraph, and after the above, Chapter finds Schreber in his house, anxious and sensing something is out of the ordinary as his wife seems unusually silent in her parlour. The cook is anxious to speak to his wife but he is loathe to disturb her, the reasoning being that if a wife was not already in her husband's company, then she quite probably did not wish to be.

Looking at the cook, he remembers her prominent varicose veins on her calves, which he once surreptitiously glimpsed when he went down to the kitchen and found her, back turned to him, scrubbing the floor on her knees

As he often did, Schreber remembered those blue snakes now, standing outside the parlour with his hand on the door handle. A noise came into his head - a buzz - as if promoted by memory, and with it came a thought - that cook was a mother and that she had given birth to many children. There were the rightful scars carried by such women. Nothing. A little trap? He stepped back from the idea and thought of something else: his bedtime pipe lot and warm in the palm of his hand. The cold brass of the door handle. Something solid. A defence against his old illness, against dreams of motherhood, death and the way of things. Of God and women. Womb-thought. He put his hand on the door handle and pushed it open.

There he finds his wife semi-conscous, collapsed from a non-fatal stroke, and his reaction completes the relapse of his mental health. To his mind the person lying there isn't his wife:

She was not like this.

She would not let herself become like this. She was a rock, a mighty fortress.

But if not, then what was thing in his arms? If it was not a puppet? If it was a puppet, and not his wife, then where was that woman: calm, even-handed and haughty, dismissive even to him? What was this? This panting thing? Moaning. It was one thing or the other, this thing cradled on his arms, this grinning mannequin. It's skin was stretched pale and taut over the bones of the skull, taking on the appearance of wax, like a dressmaker' s dummy. It was a sculpture modelled on his wife's form, but without her soul.

That is not my wife he tells the attending doctor and searches first the house and then the streets for his missing real wife, going outside into a cold, windy day:

He pulled his coat tighter around his shoulders and hesitated, thinking he might turn back and have the girl bring him the calfskin gloves and perhaps even the Russian fur hat, but when he looked back down the street it was not there.

His house was not there.

Neither were the trees. No railings. No streetlamps.

On their place were representations of those things.

People too appear to him as fleeting-improvised-wretched-plaything-human-beings. Puppets, soul-less-automata, clicking and whirring and chirruping to each other on a flat street of false houses and dust blown by the perishing cold wind [...] their lives ended the moment they were put of his sight.
[...]
Playthings.

He fails to recognise even his adopted daughter (although later the novel hints that she may be his wife's illegitimate child, conceived during one of his periods of confinement) when she returns from an errand, although her appearance and, particularly, a distinctive brooch appear somehow familiar:

Hadn't he once given something like that to a thing like this.

He tells her:

You are nothing. There is nothing. A puppet. A plaything of the Lower God.

But when he touches her and finds she is not the flat flimsy facade he anticipated but firm, warm, living, breathing flesh, he temporarily regains his mental balance. Taking her hand:

It has been a most unusual morning," he said "I am not quite sure what is happening.

But the positive effect lasts only minutes, and Schreber's mental relapse ultimately sends him back to an asylum where he later describes his daughter to the doctor as:

A cruel fiction, a parody stitched together from the corpses of innumerable tiny birds, whose aim it into mock and crow and speaking of the corruption of the Schreber family line ... She has been taken over by the soul of a palsied whore who stares out from her eyes and takes lascivious pleasure in deriding your masculine pride ... her wrists and ankles are moved by the agency of the lower God.

Playthings is based on a real-life case story - I'm indebted to the Wikipedia entry for the following summary:

Daniel Paul Schreber (25 July 1842 – 14 April 1911) was a German judge who suffered from what was then diagnosed as dementia praecox (later known as paranoid schizophrenia or schizophrenia, paranoid type). He described his 2nd mental illness (1893–1902), making also a brief reference to the 1st disorder (1884–1885) in his book [b:Memoirs of My Nervous Illness|287490|Memoirs of My Nervous Illness|Daniel Paul Schreber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320554617l/287490._SY75_.jpg|278922] (original German title Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken). The Memoirs became an influential book in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis thanks to its interpretation by Sigmund Freud.

Schreber was a successful and highly respected judge until middle age when the onset of his psychosis occurred. He woke up one morning with the thought that it would be pleasant to "succumb" to sexual intercourse as a woman. He was alarmed and felt that this thought had come from somewhere else, not from himself. He even hypothesized that the thought had come from a doctor who had experimented with hypnosis on him; he thought that the doctor had telepathically invaded his mind. He believed his primary psychiatrist, Prof. Paul Flechsig, had contact with him using a "nerve-language" of which Schreber said humans are unaware. He believed that hundreds of people's souls took special interest in him, and contacted his nerves by using "divine rays", telling him special information, or requesting things of him. During one of his stays at the Sonnenstein asylum, he concluded that there are "fleeting-improvised-men" in the world, which he believed were souls that temporarily resided in a human body, by way of a divine miracle.

Alex Pheby's fascinating novel is set after the publication of his memoirs and covers his 3rd and final disorder, which saw him confined to an asylum until his death. The novel is told in the 3rd person but from Schreber's perspective, and explores the various causes of his mental state (rather rejecting the Freudian interpretation in the process).

In the novel, several years in the asylum go past but Schreber is unaware of the passing of time, believing he has been there only days or weeks, always expecting to be home for Christmas, but prevented from doing so by both his doctor, Rössler, and the reluctance of his wife, already struggling with the aftereffects of the stroke on her own health.

The real-life Schreber's memoir was intended not as a case study of psychosis but rather to discuss the legal question of 'In what circumstance can a person deemed insane be detained in an asylum against his declared will?' and in the novel the Schreber character appeals to his wife, daughter and sister to help ensure his release:

If I wish to return home, then why shouldn't I?

Don't go please! I am not well. I want to be among the people I love. These men ... I am surrounded by dogs. I despise them! They treat me as if i were a fool .. worse! A criminal or a child! I see you and realise that I must leave here. Is that too much to ask?

He is tormented by Muller the orderly, who has a grudge against judges ever since his brother Karl was executed for excessive debts (or rather for murder provoked by his financial penury), and his land confiscated and sold to build the asylum. Although as the novel progressed it is unclear whether some of Miller's excesses exist only in Schreber's mind as a projection of his guilt towards those he himself, as a former judge, had condemned down the years.

And he is berated by a Jewish fellow inmate Alexander Zilberschlag, who knows intimate details of Schreber's life. When Schreber was a boy, the similarly aged Zilberschlag lived with his family as a tenant of Schreber's father (and the association calls up hidden guilt associated with some form of pogrom), but his presence now in the asylum seems only to be in Schreber's imagination. Alexander serves serving both as a vessel for Schreber's own troubled feelings about anti-Semitism (seemingly both endorsing it, but identifying with Jewish victims of persecution), and as a reminder of Schreber's childhood, which lies at the root of his mental problems.

Schreber's father was an extremely strict disciplinarian and fitness fanatic (Straight posture. Straight thought. Straight action.) until an accident changes him completely, turning him, in Schreber's mind, to not his father but just "a statue", in echoes of his later view of his wife post her stroke (see quote above).

As if by miracle, this man was transformed from the examplar of health - as the embodiment of his own words - and made into this bent and bowed statue. He was made into disease.

What of the man who wore the uniform, with brass buttons and a peaked cap? How could that man be made into this? By a fallen ladder? Impossible! By a bang to the head? By a cut the size of a finger? A slight - so slight - depression of the skull, not even a fracture: a swelling that was gone in a week or less, stitched and cleaned and under gauze so quickly that it was barely noticed?

In a chapter introduced as "They discover pertinent facts but neither of them are in a position to recognise them", Doctor Rössler interrogated Schreber as to why he has no biological children, causing Schreber to recall (but not share with the doctor) his wife's stillbirths, with early miscarriages but also two babies carried to term but born dead, first a daughter then a son:

He would not move. Could not move. Could not be induced to move no matter what Schreber said or did. Dead. No matter how he pleased or shouted. Like a creation of a lower god. An incompetent god. A god who could not understand living things. A god who knew only corpses, and made of them his playthings, animating them by pulling their puppet strings, but refusing even that.

He tells the doctor:

It is too bright. God will see me. In my belly is an octopus and in it are God's children. Living children. There are things insist not think of.

In a dream, Schreber relives an (unsuccesful) election attempt, except in the dream the electors are automatons:

"The feeling in his stomach was intense to the point of hysteria, literal hysteria, as if a woman's organ had been placed inside him and was flooding his body with the honours that bought so many of that sex to irrationality and emotional incontinence. He could feel it in himself, he who had been chosen by these clockwork men as an example of something else: of masculinity, of continence, of fortitude and strength, of knowledge. Wasn't he a man who took after his father? They held him to be a great thinker - a great man - an opinion Schreber would never have disavowed. But he knew, as his family knew - even his mother - that the same man had been weak, bowed down by pain, despite his stoicism. Now if they could only see inside Schreber, their new ideal, who stood before them as a symbol of power and authority, inside him was the febrile machine of a woman's weakness."

A fascinating novel, although one for which I felt an inadequate reader. The novel is fictional but Pheby clearly has a real understanding of the detailed debates about the Schreber case (“the most written about document in all psychiatric literature” per Rosemary Dinnage's introduction) as well as his own theories to suggest, whereas I was previously completely unaware of Schreber and have little knowledge of psychology. And the author's afterword suggests that the novel - and the Schreber case - touch on the "psychological structure of fascism" based on Eric Santner's [b:My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity|1013090|My Own Private Germany Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity|Eric L. Santner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1180233052l/1013090._SX50_.jpg|999214] - but that aspect rather escaped me.

The author's own commentary on the book and the case itself were very helpful to my understanding: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/december-2016/schreber-plaything

Worthwhile and an absorbing read. Thanks to the wonderful Galley Beggar Press for a review copy.

jackielaw's review

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5.0

“Not at all, Herr Schreber. You do not seem cured at all. But I don’t imagine there is anything much I can do to cure you. I can bring you here and you can see how it is that everything is quite sensible and ordinary. I can help you see that your anxieties are exaggerations of very simple and commonplace problems that a man might have. […] But I cannot make you see what is in front of you.”

Playthings, by Alex Pheby, is written from the point of view of a retired German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, who, upon finding his wife collapsed on the floor of their parlour, becomes psychotically agitated. Paul suffered from what was then diagnosed as dementia praecox, which today is known as paranoid schizophrenia. Being taken inside the head of a man with this illness is disturbing, but the author does so with aplomb.

Paul Schreber was born in 1842, in Leipzig, Saxony. He was the son of a successful physician who founded and ran the Orthopaedic Institute in which Paul and his four siblings were raised. His father was a pedagogue, demanding that all in his home adhere to a strict routine. He raised his son to believe that boys should be manly and energetic, and that the poor or deformed, including those he treated at his institute, were lesser beings.

Paul Schreber suffered three major psychotic episodes in his life, describing the second in a memoir which became an influential book in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis thanks to its interpretation by Freud (the memoir has become a key text for students of psychology and modern and social and cultural history). Alex Pheby has taken the known facts and woven them into a compelling and compassionate account of how it would be to live with this illness.

Early on in the book, when Schreber is wandering the streets, he encounters members of the public whom he talks to from the confusion his reality has become. He frightens and appalls them, pushing them aside as insubstantial, inconsequential objects. He is intent on pursuing what to him seems a valid response to a skewed world.

At times this world becomes two dimensional; familiar people and places appear flimsy, ripples in space.

“His house was not there. Neither were the trees. No railings. No streetlamps. In their place were representations of these things. The objects […] they were changed […] they were all wrong. […] all these things were there, but when Schreber came close and put his cold fingertips to them they were smooth as pieces of letter paper and just as thin […] all utterly false.”

Schreber’s reality will often digress from that which those around him can see. People appear, who talk to him of his past, who know things that they should not. They remind him of incidents which he finds embarrassing or upsetting. They force him to acknowledge facts he has difficulty facing.

Much of what Schreber does and says during his time in hospital is wiped from his memory. He loses days, weeks, sometimes months at a time. During his more lucid moments he looks back on his life and the reader learns of his childhood, snapshots of significant moments. There are fleeting references to incidents which disturb his equilibrium, memories which he has buried in the basement of his mind.

Schreber’s family struggle to cope with what he has become. His daughter wishes to bring him home but his wife fears she would be unable to cope. She worries that he will write another memoir and embarrass them further. His first contained wild imaginings from his extreme delusional state, although he did not accept that they were delusions. He now denies that he ever had such thoughts.

This book allows the reader to see not only the patient’s struggles and fears but also the impotence of those around, however worthy their aims. Solutions acceptable to society involve locking the patient away, physically or pharmaceutically. With no cure available it is possible to empathise with all involved.

An incredible work of fiction, all the more fascinating for being based on an actual case. The writing is taut, intense, the everyday world a phantom which Schreber tries so desperately to attain. His disturbance of mind is not so much explained as experienced. This story is powerful and moving; I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the humanity behind mental illness.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Galley Beggar Press.

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