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kaceys_escapism's review against another edition
dark
funny
informative
slow-paced
3.0
i think this book had alot of potential which got wasted for the mad rant in the last 100 pages. this book could've been 200-250 pages. however, i did enjoy the 1st and second part of the book, very informative with some beautiful passages. someone interested in the field of psychiatry should definitely consider reading this.
exaltations's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Really interesting read. I loved the second section and really enjoyed the first (particularly upon some reflection after reading the second section, which illuminates certain elements of the first in greater detail), but I was a little lost towards the end. I understand that that was intentional on the author’s part, though. Goetz’ writing style is phenomenal and does an excellent job of putting you inside the mind of someone slowly going insane . Not for the faint of heart!
verbamatic's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
arirang's review
3.0
But as time goes on, inevitably they turn into one single patient, this entire group of individuals becomes one and the same patient, someone who loses it, gets medicated, clams down, then loses it again, and so it again, and so it goes with all of them, and the same thing happens with the relatives, eventually it’s just one relative telling you the same guy-wrenching family and partner stories. You’d like to try and take a proper interest in the individual, in every individual and his respective fate, but you just can’t, it suddenly happens that you’re just not interested anymore. A jumble of suffering, a morass.
Irre was the first novel, in 1983, of Rainald Goetz and has become something of a cult novel. But it appears in English in 2017, as Insane, courtesy of Adrian Nathan-West's excellent translation, and Fitzcarraldo Editions, an "independent publisher specialising in contemporary fiction and long-form essays. Founded in 2014, it focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language."
This was certainly a very distinctive read if not always entirely straightforward.
It is based around Dr Raspe, a young psychiatric and punk rocker, starting in his first practice at an institution (his name a likely nod to the Baader-Meinhof member Jan-Carl Raspe).
The novel is told in three sections of very different styles.
The first presents a succession of short passages in a variety of unattributed passages from a variety of voices, doctors and patients alike, describing their illnesses, insights and incidents. The opening quote very much describes the deliberate but disorientating effect – ‘a jumble of suffering, a morass.’
One lengthy speech has someone (Raspe?) address the other doctors:
I repeat: the truth of madness, banal as it is contested by all sides, may be reduced to the principle of the cumulative capacities of the abstract free will. Anyone who has discovered anything different about madness is cordially invited to come to the microphone and give us their account of it, and we will be glad to discuss it together. To give the lie to a widespread slander, the results divulged just now are not a dogma in the least, but instead the corollary of a way of thinking directed towards an awareness of the world, and even this is already a scandal in the university, where the distinguished professors have comfortably attained the most splendid stupidity with their philosophical jokes about the unknowability of the world. As we have arrived at our results not through free association or spiritistic séances, but instead through constant hewing to reality, and have made progress, today, for example, in relation to madness, we have no need of a plurality of opinion or that tolerance with which bourgeois society decks out its intellectual sloth and its errors. We are moving past these formalities, these security measures that serve as cover for every intellectual defect, which is then accorded the same right to exist as rationally grounded knowledge; we are moving past this banter to the results of our thinking and making these results public in numerous ways, and naturally this leads to the idiotic reproach of dogmatism, whose ideological character I want to point out briefly, in order perhaps to encourage those who are reluctant to enter the conversation. So where are all the psychologists, psychiatrists, antipsychiatrists, sociologists, and depth analysts? Come to the microphone and acquaint us with your arguments. And let me say once more, pointedly and slowly, so you may write it down while you gather your courage: In the exercise (established through false consciousness) of his thoroughly free will, the madman has chosen delusion, he opts for insanity, in order to reckon with the demands of capital and state, dispensing with the criteria the bourgeois world imposes to determine its members’ validity.
The second section, while still far from standard prose, is the most straightforward, and tells, in the third person, the story of Raspe’s time in the institute. This part worked very well as it helped make sense of the fragments in the first, as the different patients and doctors’ stories became clearer, and it also documents Raspe’s own difficulties with his work and his own mental torment.
The third section is told in the first person – albeit the identity of the narrator seems to switch between Raspe and the author Goetz himself so that who is speaking is unclear. The text is interspersed with pictures, cartoons etc. E.g. one part has the narrator and a friend singing along to The Stray Cats Strut:
KLAUS: And the next one. Uh uh uh uh. I get my dinner fro-om a garbage can, shloobydooby duby dee, woow.
BOTH: I don’t wonna chasing mice around, shloobey-doo-, I wish I could be as Kevin -
ME: Kevin who?
(the real lyrics being
I don't bother chasing mice around
I slink down the alleyway looking for a fight
Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night
Singin' the blues while the lady cats cry
"Wild stray cat, you're a real gone guy"
I wish I could be as carefree and wild
But I got cat class and I got cat style)
And while it ostensibly tells of Raspe’s time after the institute, it increasingly addresses more the cultural establishment of Germany at the time.
The writing and setting of the novel in the early 1980s is crucial as the punk rock and new wave era gave way to the bland commercialism of 80s pop (not sure it there was a German equivalent of Stock Aitken Waterman, but if there was it is probably satirised here) and politically, the centre-left government fell, ushering in the era of Helmut Kohl.
Raspe links mental illness to the prevailing socio-economic culture:
Your job at the clinic is the epitome of reactionary politics in action. A society that consistently makes its members ill, mentally ill in particular, employs psychiatry to help itself survive. You are healing people whose sicknesses are a reaction to the twisted conditions they live in for the sole purpose of enabling them to function again amid the conditions that made them sick in the first place. As a psychiatrist, you eradicate symptoms of this society’s debasement without even considering the causes, let alone working towards eradicating them: to the contrary, you actually cover them up, so your labour conforms to the same principles as advertising, consumption, the enhanced gratification of urges, improved work conditions, in brief, the principles of societal self-preservation. You need to decide whether it’s really so great, letting the strategy of capitalist reason works through you as they do through so many others, and forget all your therapeutic nonsense, that’s a dead end. Look, you don’t even need to daydream with political romantics like Marcuse about the revolutionary potential of the marginalised and outsiders, historical materialism on its own is enough to show how all of that is politically reactionary praxis, reactionary, get it, reactionary.
The difficulty for the English reader in 2017 is the bewildering array of references to specific figures e.g. praise for the the films of Herbert Achternbusch and for Diedrich Diederichsen:
Professor Diedrich Diederichsen, Ordinary Emeritus. A clever professor, as you’d have to be, logically, to be an Emeritus at only 24 years old, but so he is, they shut his journal down on him because it was too clever. It was the only unboring German magazine. It was called Sounds and it was the salvation of Germany. Now we have the 8-year plague of Kohl and nothing but Titanic. That fortifying sentence might go something like: On it goes with new cool cult legends and other consolations so strength and dignity may flourish in order - that’s right!
At least these can be googled (https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-antic-visions-of-herbert-achternbusch) but far more confusing is the score settling with various figures (authors, cultural commentators) often referred to by nicknames, initials, or physical descriptions. The style is of a punk version of Thomas Bernhard but whereas his The Woodcutters has similar indirect references to actual cultural figures, the novel still works even if the reader (as in my case) has no appreciation of this: whereas Goetz’s jibes make little sense out of context.
So overall a book I am glad to have read, but which was only good, now 30+ years later and read in another country, in places.
A helpful interview with the author:
http://conversationalreading.com/six-questions-for-adrian-nathan-west-on-insane-by-rainald-goetz/
Two excerpts to give you a flavour
https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/insane#_
http://partisanhotel.co.uk/Insane
Irre was the first novel, in 1983, of Rainald Goetz and has become something of a cult novel. But it appears in English in 2017, as Insane, courtesy of Adrian Nathan-West's excellent translation, and Fitzcarraldo Editions, an "independent publisher specialising in contemporary fiction and long-form essays. Founded in 2014, it focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language."
This was certainly a very distinctive read if not always entirely straightforward.
It is based around Dr Raspe, a young psychiatric and punk rocker, starting in his first practice at an institution (his name a likely nod to the Baader-Meinhof member Jan-Carl Raspe).
The novel is told in three sections of very different styles.
The first presents a succession of short passages in a variety of unattributed passages from a variety of voices, doctors and patients alike, describing their illnesses, insights and incidents. The opening quote very much describes the deliberate but disorientating effect – ‘a jumble of suffering, a morass.’
One lengthy speech has someone (Raspe?) address the other doctors:
I repeat: the truth of madness, banal as it is contested by all sides, may be reduced to the principle of the cumulative capacities of the abstract free will. Anyone who has discovered anything different about madness is cordially invited to come to the microphone and give us their account of it, and we will be glad to discuss it together. To give the lie to a widespread slander, the results divulged just now are not a dogma in the least, but instead the corollary of a way of thinking directed towards an awareness of the world, and even this is already a scandal in the university, where the distinguished professors have comfortably attained the most splendid stupidity with their philosophical jokes about the unknowability of the world. As we have arrived at our results not through free association or spiritistic séances, but instead through constant hewing to reality, and have made progress, today, for example, in relation to madness, we have no need of a plurality of opinion or that tolerance with which bourgeois society decks out its intellectual sloth and its errors. We are moving past these formalities, these security measures that serve as cover for every intellectual defect, which is then accorded the same right to exist as rationally grounded knowledge; we are moving past this banter to the results of our thinking and making these results public in numerous ways, and naturally this leads to the idiotic reproach of dogmatism, whose ideological character I want to point out briefly, in order perhaps to encourage those who are reluctant to enter the conversation. So where are all the psychologists, psychiatrists, antipsychiatrists, sociologists, and depth analysts? Come to the microphone and acquaint us with your arguments. And let me say once more, pointedly and slowly, so you may write it down while you gather your courage: In the exercise (established through false consciousness) of his thoroughly free will, the madman has chosen delusion, he opts for insanity, in order to reckon with the demands of capital and state, dispensing with the criteria the bourgeois world imposes to determine its members’ validity.
The second section, while still far from standard prose, is the most straightforward, and tells, in the third person, the story of Raspe’s time in the institute. This part worked very well as it helped make sense of the fragments in the first, as the different patients and doctors’ stories became clearer, and it also documents Raspe’s own difficulties with his work and his own mental torment.
The third section is told in the first person – albeit the identity of the narrator seems to switch between Raspe and the author Goetz himself so that who is speaking is unclear. The text is interspersed with pictures, cartoons etc. E.g. one part has the narrator and a friend singing along to The Stray Cats Strut:
KLAUS: And the next one. Uh uh uh uh. I get my dinner fro-om a garbage can, shloobydooby duby dee, woow.
BOTH: I don’t wonna chasing mice around, shloobey-doo-, I wish I could be as Kevin -
ME: Kevin who?
(the real lyrics being
I don't bother chasing mice around
I slink down the alleyway looking for a fight
Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night
Singin' the blues while the lady cats cry
"Wild stray cat, you're a real gone guy"
I wish I could be as carefree and wild
But I got cat class and I got cat style)
And while it ostensibly tells of Raspe’s time after the institute, it increasingly addresses more the cultural establishment of Germany at the time.
The writing and setting of the novel in the early 1980s is crucial as the punk rock and new wave era gave way to the bland commercialism of 80s pop (not sure it there was a German equivalent of Stock Aitken Waterman, but if there was it is probably satirised here) and politically, the centre-left government fell, ushering in the era of Helmut Kohl.
Raspe links mental illness to the prevailing socio-economic culture:
Your job at the clinic is the epitome of reactionary politics in action. A society that consistently makes its members ill, mentally ill in particular, employs psychiatry to help itself survive. You are healing people whose sicknesses are a reaction to the twisted conditions they live in for the sole purpose of enabling them to function again amid the conditions that made them sick in the first place. As a psychiatrist, you eradicate symptoms of this society’s debasement without even considering the causes, let alone working towards eradicating them: to the contrary, you actually cover them up, so your labour conforms to the same principles as advertising, consumption, the enhanced gratification of urges, improved work conditions, in brief, the principles of societal self-preservation. You need to decide whether it’s really so great, letting the strategy of capitalist reason works through you as they do through so many others, and forget all your therapeutic nonsense, that’s a dead end. Look, you don’t even need to daydream with political romantics like Marcuse about the revolutionary potential of the marginalised and outsiders, historical materialism on its own is enough to show how all of that is politically reactionary praxis, reactionary, get it, reactionary.
The difficulty for the English reader in 2017 is the bewildering array of references to specific figures e.g. praise for the the films of Herbert Achternbusch and for Diedrich Diederichsen:
Professor Diedrich Diederichsen, Ordinary Emeritus. A clever professor, as you’d have to be, logically, to be an Emeritus at only 24 years old, but so he is, they shut his journal down on him because it was too clever. It was the only unboring German magazine. It was called Sounds and it was the salvation of Germany. Now we have the 8-year plague of Kohl and nothing but Titanic. That fortifying sentence might go something like: On it goes with new cool cult legends and other consolations so strength and dignity may flourish in order - that’s right!
At least these can be googled (https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-antic-visions-of-herbert-achternbusch) but far more confusing is the score settling with various figures (authors, cultural commentators) often referred to by nicknames, initials, or physical descriptions. The style is of a punk version of Thomas Bernhard but whereas his The Woodcutters has similar indirect references to actual cultural figures, the novel still works even if the reader (as in my case) has no appreciation of this: whereas Goetz’s jibes make little sense out of context.
So overall a book I am glad to have read, but which was only good, now 30+ years later and read in another country, in places.
A helpful interview with the author:
http://conversationalreading.com/six-questions-for-adrian-nathan-west-on-insane-by-rainald-goetz/
Two excerpts to give you a flavour
https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/insane#_
http://partisanhotel.co.uk/Insane
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