Botany of Madness is a daring debut novel from a promising new literary voice, Germany's Leon Engler. In the psychology and creative writing lecturer's dark comedy, a Munich psychologist finds that his most challenging case study is that of his own family.
This autofiction-inflected novel opens in a Vienna storage unit, with the unnamed narrator sifting through boxes of his mother's junk. The clutter and paperwork are all that was left after she was evicted from her apartment and the family valuables and mementos were accidentally incinerated. When he starts working at a psychiatric hospital, he realizes the importance of listening and asking questions, even if there are no answers. With his family's material past gone, it's now up to him to re-create it in words.
It's a potentially solemn rundown of hereditary mental illnesses and dependencies: "My family tree seems struck by almost every plague to be found in the psychiatric bible." His maternal grandmother was bipolar and alcoholic and made 12 suicide attempts. Her daughter, determined to be optimistic, unlike her mother, still succumbed to alcoholism. The two were in and out of psychiatric clinics for detox and depression treatment. The narrator's father was depressed, too; a manual laborer always dreaming of escape to Laos or Spain. Both parents were frequently kicked out, starting with the remote homestead where the narrator was born. It's as if internal turmoil translated into instability, leading them to change places, jobs, and partners often. The title refers to Carl Linnaeus and Emil Kraepelin, botanists who also created taxonomies of mental illness. The narrator knows, though, that diagnoses, including his informal ones of "nomadic foolishness" and "pathological homesickness," don't tell the whole story--for patients or for relatives.
Engler's wry humor and animated prose ("First sentence of the family rules: Life is suffering") more than counterbalance the bleakness of the content. The novel moves freely among vignettes from the family's past and present, the narrator's work, and his research in the home library inherited from his late neighbor (with quotes from Freud, Nietzsche et al. identified in footnotes). As he ponders the future--"I am scared of not going mad because it is a rite of passage in my family" --he accepts life's paradoxes and frees himself of the responsibility to rescue his "dearest wicked" parents. Quirky and bittersweet, Botany of Madness is just right for Christian Kracht and Katharina Volckmer fans. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck
Shelf Talker: In Leon Engler's phenomenal, darkly comic debut novel, a psychologist undertakes a journey into memory and theory in an attempt to understand generations of mental illness in his family tree.