Post by account_disabled on Jan 4, 2018 11:23:35 GMT 1
Hi,
In 1971, Audrey Death has spent half a century catatonic in Friern mental hospital. Zack Busner – a radical psychiatrist just recovering from coming under the influence of RD Laing – has an idea. He recognises that she and several of the hospital's other long-term patients may not be mad, but are actually suffering from the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica. Oliver Sacks-style, and somewhat outside the formal channels, he tries treating them with L-dopa. They start waking up.
Meanwhile, if that's the word, we go back to Audrey's wartime past as a munitions worker in the Woolwich arsenal, and those of her older brother, Albert, a war office civil servant with an eidetic memory (like Zack Busner, another old Self theme), and her younger brother, Stanley, who goes off to fight in the war. A third strand of the story shows us Busner, in old age, shambling around north London and looking back on his life – a journey that is to culminate in a visit to the now-decommissioned mental hospital.
Umbrella is not, be warned, altogether easy going: 400 pages of unbroken stream-of-consciousness dotted across three time frames, leaping jaggedly between four points of view, and with barely a paragraph break, let alone a chapter heading. I started out wondering whether, as a prank, Self had decided to write the novel that Richard Tull, the unpopular writer in Martin Amis's The Information, is working on. Self's sentences themselves sometimes resemble Victorian lunatic asylums refitted for 1970s use: ugly, overstuffed, clattering with the moans of lunatics and bristling with redundant gothic spires. The antic gurgles of laughter you find in Self's earlier work are few and far between. In their place, though, is a sustained depth and seriousness, and an ambition of technique that I haven't seen in him before.
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In 1971, Audrey Death has spent half a century catatonic in Friern mental hospital. Zack Busner – a radical psychiatrist just recovering from coming under the influence of RD Laing – has an idea. He recognises that she and several of the hospital's other long-term patients may not be mad, but are actually suffering from the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica. Oliver Sacks-style, and somewhat outside the formal channels, he tries treating them with L-dopa. They start waking up.
Meanwhile, if that's the word, we go back to Audrey's wartime past as a munitions worker in the Woolwich arsenal, and those of her older brother, Albert, a war office civil servant with an eidetic memory (like Zack Busner, another old Self theme), and her younger brother, Stanley, who goes off to fight in the war. A third strand of the story shows us Busner, in old age, shambling around north London and looking back on his life – a journey that is to culminate in a visit to the now-decommissioned mental hospital.
Umbrella is not, be warned, altogether easy going: 400 pages of unbroken stream-of-consciousness dotted across three time frames, leaping jaggedly between four points of view, and with barely a paragraph break, let alone a chapter heading. I started out wondering whether, as a prank, Self had decided to write the novel that Richard Tull, the unpopular writer in Martin Amis's The Information, is working on. Self's sentences themselves sometimes resemble Victorian lunatic asylums refitted for 1970s use: ugly, overstuffed, clattering with the moans of lunatics and bristling with redundant gothic spires. The antic gurgles of laughter you find in Self's earlier work are few and far between. In their place, though, is a sustained depth and seriousness, and an ambition of technique that I haven't seen in him before.
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Medical Business Promotion