2025 Readings 60

 This morning I finished Fine Grabol's What Kingdom, which I picked up Saturday at the Bear Pond bookstore in downtown Montpelier. Something about the cover seemed familiar, and I recognized the time of the translator, Martin Aitken, who had translated The Employees (which I finished a few days ago, and loved). Maybe it's a new collection of Danish fiction that I stumbled across, and, if so, this is a wonderful discovery. It reads very much like The Employees, that is, a series of very brief and disconnected paragraphs (and sometimes merely sentences), that is more than the sum of its parts. It's set in a sort of halfway house for folks dealing with various mental illnesses, which is both a commentary on the illnesses but also the mental health industry - and I would argue, also what constitutes community. Let me include an example, in this case the first isolated from the third and final section, "Secrets":

We go in and out of each other's rooms all the time, open a door and lie down on a sofa bed, watch TV or sit with a jigsaw puzzle; we water the plants and bake bread, lean against the walls is if to make a physical contact apparent; we open a packet of cigarettes with the same restless ease, we look at each other's bloated stomachs and wink secretively. We increase our medications, decrease our medications, discontinue our medications and start all over again; we take Oxapax and laugh at the psychiatrists; we try to die in different ways, while life and the section and the system keep us here; we seldom cry; we drink beer on the patio on Fridays; we hear the favorite music of the infirm old people on the ground floor. We say hello to Ahmed the cleaning assistant we try to understand our medication plans; we draw up schedules detailing our entire lives; a meal plan, a week plan, a breakdown of our challenging behavior; we write things down when we suffer anxiety attacks, what happens before and what happened after; we prepare budgets and tear them up in sheer fright when the job center phones; we're on the sick and incapacitated; we swap clothes and borrow each other's shoes; we plan our summer holidays in the section's caravan and never see if through; we open the fridge and close it again. We take up boxing and we start a band; we sew a cushion cover and attend a yoga session; we participate in group therapy, in cognitive therapy, in psychotherapy, in dialectic behavioral therapy; we go for a psychoeducation appointment and suffer an anxiety attack on the sidewalk outside; we have no other option but trust; we bury our hands in the soft folds of our face and will never be the same; we eat thin cookies at night in each other's rooms, smoke another cigarette, and our mouths become dry.

It's sort of the product of an intermarriage between Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Highly recommended.