Ivana Dobrakovová, Bellevue, trans. Julia and Peter Sherwood (London: Jantar, 2019), 220 pp.
Of all the Slovak novels in English I’ve reviewed so far, the assignment of three stars to this one is the most arbitrary of any rating I’ve given. It’s a compromise, actually. If I were to rate the novel based on its accomplishment of its intended goal, it certainly deserves five stars. If I were to rate it on the pleasure I took in reading it, it would get one star.
But that can hardly count as a legitimate a criticism of a book that maps out the degeneration of a mind into madness.
The plot, such as it is, is simple: a young Slovak woman named Blanka volunteers at a residential home for physically and mentally disabled people in Marseille, France, and over the course of her several short weeks there she loses her grip on reality… or does she? Maybe she’s the only one who really gets what’s going on.
This seems to be endemic to fictional attempts to account for mental breakdown. We’re never quite certain if the crazy are really crazy, or maybe just see things as they really are without the fictions and blinders that make reality endurable for the rest of us. Blanka’s turning point is the horrifying realization that “we all hate each other” (p. 73).
It’s a theme that recurs again and again. She has had to face up to her utter lack of compassion for the disabled people she’s supposed to serve—and also their resentment toward her. But the insight won’t stay confined to the residents of Bellevue (a name that certainly resonates with Americans as the most famous mental hospital in New York City). Before long Blanka perceives universal hatred in every direction. Added to the discomfort she already feels in her own skin, this realization unsettles her reason to the point that she believes she has murdered her whole family—even while talking on the phone to her mother.
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It’s an extraordinarily uncomfortable read, because the frustration Blanka feels toward the residents is exactly what the reader feels toward her. But are we really no better than Blanka? Or is Blanka really on to something? Or is Blanka in fact just a big blank and whatever vicissitudes of horror float through the universe stick to her vast emptiness and stay there?
The author doesn’t help us out, much. There’s a suggestion, here and there, of Blanka’s prior depressions, and that her dead father suffered from bipolar disorder. We seem to be taunted with these hints. It would be so much easier if we could diagnose and then dismiss Blanka simply as a mental patient and therefore unworthy of our further concern. Her problem can’t possibly be ours.
I suspect, though, the psychiatric diagnoses are meant to be red herrings. If they’re accurate, they don’t do anything to address the existential crisis that pointless mental suffering exposes in regard to the universe. What do we actually do with and for people’s whose minds have turned against them? A label and a dose of medicine doesn’t even begin to deal with these harsh facts of human existence.
But more than anything, as I forced myself to track with Blanka’s degeneration, I wondered if the point is not mental illness but existential illness. Blanka comes from a world so shallow, vapid, empty, and pointless that her “illness” might be the only “rational” reaction to it all. Nothing in her life provides her any resources to face the world’s suffering squarely, with integrity or honor or courage, nothing with which to carve out sustaining and transforming meaning.
By the end of it, I thought, if Nietzsche had written novels, they might have turned out like this: the virulent hatred of the weak for the strong, a God so dead that he isn’t even worth a mention, an absence of any higher value to direct life, and a perfectly rational madness in the face of the nothingness.
