Playthings

by Alex Pheby

He pulled his coat around his shoulders and hesitated, thinking that he might turn back and have the girl bring him the calfskin gloves and perhaps even the Russian fur hat, but when he looked back down the street it was not there. His house was not there.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Historical, Literary Fiction, Mental Health, British Literature, Literature

235 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 2015

About the author

Alex Pheby is a British author and academic.

His latest book is Mordew, the first in a fantasy trilogy.

His second novel, Playthings, was described as “the best neuro-novel ever written" in Literary Review. The novel deals with the true case of Daniel Paul Schreber, a 19th-century German judge afflicted by schizophrenia who was committed to an asylum. In 2016, Playthings was shortlisted for the £30,000 Wellcome Book Prize.

In 2019, his third novel, Lucia, which deals with the life of James Joyce's daughter, was joint winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Pheby is also the author of Grace, published by Two Ravens Press.

He currently (2020) teaches at the University of Greenwich and has studied at Manchester University, Manchester Metropolitan University, Goldsmiths. and UEA.

Reviews

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alex Pheby's most recent book was Lucia, an impressive and unsettling book that explored the elusive story of the life of Lucia Joyce, largely through tangential events. So I was keen to track down a copy of this, his second novel and the first to be published by Galley Beggar, partly because it is also a work of biographical fiction, its central character being the 19th century German judge Paul Schreber, who wrote a famous book about his own mental illness and delusions, which was later reinterpreted by Freud among others.

Unlike Lucia, the protagonist of this book is at centre stage throughout, but it is still very speculative because the period it covers is later than that he wrote about himself - his final decline.

Schreber wrote about his personal mythology, at times of stress and crises in his personal life (such as the stroke his wife suffers at the start of the book) he sees everything in terms of the actions of a "lesser God", who treats humans as playthings or puppets. The book is also a study of the psychological and philosophical roots of some of the delusions that led to Fascism, which makes it quite dark and disturbing at times. Schreber is haunted by his father's strict disciplinarian ideas and the regime of physical training he and his siblings were subjected to, and also by his father's own mental decline after an accident, and some of his delusions centre on "the Jew" Alexander, who he clashed with as a child and who seems to know more about Paul's own life than he does himself.

This is a very impressive book, but not an easy one - I know very little about Freud or the history of psychological ideas, so I am not really qualified to comment on how accurately Pheby inhabits Schreber and his state of mind.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disturbed by an unexpected illness, retired Senatspräsident of the High Court of Saxony, Daniel Paul Schreber, last of the great Schreber line, suffers the return of feelings and thoughts he has long kept in check.

Each chapter of Playthings opens with a scene setting title paragraph, and after the above, Chapter finds Schreber in his house, anxious and sensing something is out of the ordinary as his wife seems unusually silent in her parlour. The cook is anxious to speak to his wife but he is loathe to disturb her, the reasoning being that if a wife was not already in her husband's company, then she quite probably did not wish to be.

Looking at the cook, he remembers her prominent varicose veins on her calves, which he once surreptitiously glimpsed when he went down to the kitchen and found her, back turned to him, scrubbing the floor on her knees

As he often did, Schreber remembered those blue snakes now, standing outside the parlour with his hand on the door handle. A noise came into his head - a buzz - as if promoted by memory, and with it came a thought - that cook was a mother and that she had given birth to many children. There were the rightful scars carried by such women. Nothing. A little trap? He stepped back from the idea and thought of something else: his bedtime pipe lot and warm in the palm of his hand. The cold brass of the door handle. Something solid. A defence against his old illness, against dreams of motherhood, death and the way of things. Of God and women. Womb-thought. He put his hand on the door handle and pushed it open.

There he finds his wife semi-conscous, collapsed from a non-fatal stroke, and his reaction completes the relapse of his mental health. To his mind the person lying there isn't his wife:

She was not like this.

She would not let herself become like this. She was a rock, a mighty fortress.

But if not, then what was thing in his arms? If it was not a puppet? If it was a puppet, and not his wife, then where was that woman: calm, even-handed and haughty, dismissive even to him? What was this? This panting thing? Moaning. It was one thing or the other, this thing cradled on his arms, this grinning mannequin. It's skin was stretched pale and taut over the bones of the skull, taking on the appearance of wax, like a dressmaker' s dummy. It was a sculpture modelled on his wife's form, but without her soul.

That is not my wife he tells the attending doctor and searches first the house and then the streets for his missing real wife, going outside into a cold, windy day:

He pulled his coat tighter around his shoulders and hesitated, thinking he might turn back and have the girl bring him the calfskin gloves and perhaps even the Russian fur hat, but when he looked back down the street it was not there.

His house was not there.

Neither were the trees. No railings. No streetlamps.

On their place were representations of those things.

People too appear to him as fleeting-improvised-wretched-plaything-human-beings. Puppets, soul-less-automata, clicking and whirring and chirruping to each other on a flat street of false houses and dust blown by the perishing cold wind [...] their lives ended the moment they were put of his sight.
[...]
Playthings.

He fails to recognise even his adopted daughter (although later the novel hints that she may be his wife's illegitimate child, conceived during one of his periods of confinement) when she returns from an errand, although her appearance and, particularly, a distinctive brooch appear somehow familiar:

Hadn't he once given something like that to a thing like this.

He tells her:

You are nothing. There is nothing. A puppet. A plaything of the Lower God.

But when he touches her and finds she is not the flat flimsy facade he anticipated but firm, warm, living, breathing flesh, he temporarily regains his mental balance. Taking her hand:

It has been a most unusual morning," he said "I am not quite sure what is happening.

But the positive effect lasts only minutes, and Schreber's mental relapse ultimately sends him back to an asylum where he later describes his daughter to the doctor as:

A cruel fiction, a parody stitched together from the corpses of innumerable tiny birds, whose aim it into mock and crow and speaking of the corruption of the Schreber family line ... She has been taken over by the soul of a palsied whore who stares out from her eyes and takes lascivious pleasure in deriding your masculine pride ... her wrists and ankles are moved by the agency of the lower God.

Playthings is based on a real-life case story - I'm indebted to the Wikipedia entry for the following summary:

Daniel Paul Schreber (25 July 1842 – 14 April 1911) was a German judge who suffered from what was then diagnosed as dementia praecox (later known as paranoid schizophrenia or schizophrenia, paranoid type). He described his 2nd mental illness (1893–1902), making also a brief reference to the 1st disorder (1884–1885) in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (original German title Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken). The Memoirs became an influential book in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis thanks to its interpretation by Sigmund Freud.

Schreber was a successful and highly respected judge until middle age when the onset of his psychosis occurred. He woke up one morning with the thought that it would be pleasant to "succumb" to sexual intercourse as a woman. He was alarmed and felt that this thought had come from somewhere else, not from himself. He even hypothesized that the thought had come from a doctor who had experimented with hypnosis on him; he thought that the doctor had telepathically invaded his mind. He believed his primary psychiatrist, Prof. Paul Flechsig, had contact with him using a "nerve-language" of which Schreber said humans are unaware. He believed that hundreds of people's souls took special interest in him, and contacted his nerves by using "divine rays", telling him special information, or requesting things of him. During one of his stays at the Sonnenstein asylum, he concluded that there are "fleeting-improvised-men" in the world, which he believed were souls that temporarily resided in a human body, by way of a divine miracle.

Alex Pheby's fascinating novel is set after the publication of his memoirs and covers his 3rd and final disorder, which saw him confined to an asylum until his death. The novel is told in the 3rd person but from Schreber's perspective, and explores the various causes of his mental state (rather rejecting the Freudian interpretation in the process).

In the novel, several years in the asylum go past but Schreber is unaware of the passing of time, believing he has been there only days or weeks, always expecting to be home for Christmas, but prevented from doing so by both his doctor, Rössler, and the reluctance of his wife, already struggling with the aftereffects of the stroke on her own health.

The real-life Schreber's memoir was intended not as a case study of psychosis but rather to discuss the legal question of 'In what circumstance can a person deemed insane be detained in an asylum against his declared will?' and in the novel the Schreber character appeals to his wife, daughter and sister to help ensure his release:

If I wish to return home, then why shouldn't I?

Don't go please! I am not well. I want to be among the people I love. These men ... I am surrounded by dogs. I despise them! They treat me as if i were a fool .. worse! A criminal or a child! I see you and realise that I must leave here. Is that too much to ask?

He is tormented by Muller the orderly, who has a grudge against judges ever since his brother Karl was executed for excessive debts (or rather for murder provoked by his financial penury), and his land confiscated and sold to build the asylum. Although as the novel progressed it is unclear whether some of Miller's excesses exist only in Schreber's mind as a projection of his guilt towards those he himself, as a former judge, had condemned down the years.

And he is berated by a Jewish fellow inmate Alexander Zilberschlag, who knows intimate details of Schreber's life. When Schreber was a boy, the similarly aged Zilberschlag lived with his family as a tenant of Schreber's father (and the association calls up hidden guilt associated with some form of pogrom), but his presence now in the asylum seems only to be in Schreber's imagination. Alexander serves serving both as a vessel for Schreber's own troubled feelings about anti-Semitism (seemingly both endorsing it, but identifying with Jewish victims of persecution), and as a reminder of Schreber's childhood, which lies at the root of his mental problems.

Schreber's father was an extremely strict disciplinarian and fitness fanatic (Straight posture. Straight thought. Straight action.) until an accident changes him completely, turning him, in Schreber's mind, to not his father but just "a statue", in echoes of his later view of his wife post her stroke (see quote above).

As if by miracle, this man was transformed from the examplar of health - as the embodiment of his own words - and made into this bent and bowed statue. He was made into disease.

What of the man who wore the uniform, with brass buttons and a peaked cap? How could that man be made into this? By a fallen ladder? Impossible! By a bang to the head? By a cut the size of a finger? A slight - so slight - depression of the skull, not even a fracture: a swelling that was gone in a week or less, stitched and cleaned and under gauze so quickly that it was barely noticed?

In a chapter introduced as "They discover pertinent facts but neither of them are in a position to recognise them", Doctor Rössler interrogated Schreber as to why he has no biological children, causing Schreber to recall (but not share with the doctor) his wife's stillbirths, with early miscarriages but also two babies carried to term but born dead, first a daughter then a son:

He would not move. Could not move. Could not be induced to move no matter what Schreber said or did. Dead. No matter how he pleased or shouted. Like a creation of a lower god. An incompetent god. A god who could not understand living things. A god who knew only corpses, and made of them his playthings, animating them by pulling their puppet strings, but refusing even that.

He tells the doctor:

It is too bright. God will see me. In my belly is an octopus and in it are God's children. Living children. There are things insist not think of.

In a dream, Schreber relives an (unsuccesful) election attempt, except in the dream the electors are automatons:

"The feeling in his stomach was intense to the point of hysteria, literal hysteria, as if a woman's organ had been placed inside him and was flooding his body with the honours that bought so many of that sex to irrationality and emotional incontinence. He could feel it in himself, he who had been chosen by these clockwork men as an example of something else: of masculinity, of continence, of fortitude and strength, of knowledge. Wasn't he a man who took after his father? They held him to be a great thinker - a great man - an opinion Schreber would never have disavowed. But he knew, as his family knew - even his mother - that the same man had been weak, bowed down by pain, despite his stoicism. Now if they could only see inside Schreber, their new ideal, who stood before them as a symbol of power and authority, inside him was the febrile machine of a woman's weakness."

A fascinating novel, although one for which I felt an inadequate reader. The novel is fictional but Pheby clearly has a real understanding of the detailed debates about the Schreber case (“the most written about document in all psychiatric literature” per Rosemary Dinnage's introduction) as well as his own theories to suggest, whereas I was previously completely unaware of Schreber and have little knowledge of psychology. And the author's afterword suggests that the novel - and the Schreber case - touch on the "psychological structure of fascism" based on Eric Santner's My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity - but that aspect rather escaped me.

The author's own commentary on the book and the case itself were very helpful to my understanding: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/vo...

Worthwhile and an absorbing read. Thanks to the wonderful Galley Beggar Press for a review copy.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before reading Playthings, I would suggest two acts of preparation. Firstly, I recommend reading the acknowledgements at the end prior to actually starting the book. These acknowledgements contain a phrase about Nazi psychology and it is worth knowing this was in Pheby's mind as he wrote.

Secondly, unless you already know about him, I suggest some basic Google searching to learn about Daniel Paul Schreber. I had never heard of him prior to this, but his memoirs are, according to several articles I read, “the most written about document in all psychiatric literature”. Hardly surprising when...In a memoir Schreber wrote while in the Sonnenstein Sanatorium from 1893 to 1902, he argued that he was the last human left in a ravaged world and that his body was being transformed into a woman’s so that God could repopulate Earth using Schreber’s womb....this being a memoir written by Schreber to demonstrate his sanity and that he should be released back to his family.

There is little point in launching into a discussion of all the literature about Schreber. But the author of this novel wrote in an article that

"...the story continues. In my most recent novel, Playthings, I use Schreber in different ways. I use him as means of making the experience of mental illness understandable to an audience for whom it is too often made mysterious, couched in medical terms, or given to us as a means of engendering shock, fear, and disgust. I use him to allegorise the reactions of the state to those things that it is threatened by. I use him to explore our relationship with our own memories, with our own histories, and to demonstrate how tenuously we exist in the present. I use him to look at the mechanics of the family, and to edge us towards understanding our obligations and the power we exert over each other. And I use him to quietly expose the traumas of my own life, and so allow myself to face them, in part."

So, there is a lot going on in this book. But it is done carefully, intelligently and subtly. I will finish with another quotation, this time from Kelley Swain in The Lancet, as it seems to sum up the book very well:

Although Playthings is set in Nazi Germany—with accompanying eugenics, fascism, gymnastic health, and antisemitism—I kept thinking of R D Laing. The tension in the story comes in the distance between those looking after Schreber and his own lack of insight into his condition. No one truly communicates with one another. Pheby’s description of the Schreber family seems to fit the 1960s concept of the schizophrenic family. Difficulties between Schreber and his wife are rooted in childhood trauma, and his devastating illness descends when he thinks he’s lost her. Love, or the misplacement of it, is the ultimate problem.
Each character in Playthings is sympathetic, flawed, and utterly human, even Müller, the asylum orderly. An alcoholic who abuses those in his care, he steals bromides meant for his patients. Yet we learn the reasons for this self-medication.
In Playthings, the reliability of the narrators is always up for question, particularly that of a Judge who has lost his judgement. But their shared tragedy is rooted in confounded responsibility—to whom does the responsibility of care fall? Upon whom does the responsibility of blame rest? Towards whom, for the responsibility of love, can one turn?

[Victoria (Eve's Alexandria) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a novel that I enjoyed in a recreational sense but a deeply provocative and powerful read none the less. Pheby uses the real life case of Paul Schreber, a judge who experienced episodes of profound schizophrenic delusion, to explore society’s power structures and the roots of facism in early 20th century Europe. It’s disorienting, disturbing and fragmented, as we accompany Paul into the darkness of his final illness. Pheby is a gifted stylist, with economical and tight prose and an eye for fine metaphors. But for all that Playthings is oddly lacking in immediacy or emotion; it holds Paul and the reader at arms length, almost until the last chapter. I slipped easily into lit-crit mode while I was reading and never quite switched off from it.

[Gala · Rating 3 out of 5]

No es un mal libro, para nada. Creo que mi experiencia con Marionetas tiene que ver más con mi postura frente a la novela que con sus propias características. Está bien escrito, tiene una premisa interesante, pero es como si siempre me hubiera mantenido a distancia. Nunca pude adentrarme en la historia, ni sentirme interesada por lo que estaba leyendo. Empieza bastante bien, generando cierta intriga, pero luego ese interés inicial se desvanece. Se hace una novela confusa, que va siempre sobre lo mismo, sin muchas vueltas. Simplemente, no pude conectar con el libro.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Playthings is a sort of biography of 19th century judge Paul Schreber, who suffered from mental illness and wrote about his state of mind during one of his episodes. Alex Pheby in his first novel for independent press, Galley Beggar charts Schreber’s disillusions and paranoia.

As I know little about this topic I’m not exactly the right person to say whether or not the psychosis Schreber goes through is accurate or not but I could feel the claustrophobic thoughts going through his mind; the confusion, the constant fear that someone is watching you. On this point I thought the book was a success.

Unfortunately I felt like something was lacking. The book felt overlong and lacking in cohesion – one could say that since it’s a portrayal of a person’s unbalanced mental state the book should be all over the place – but it just didn’t work with me that well. Saying that, I do like it when I learn something new and Playthings made me aware of Paul Schreber and this is where the book worked as well. Despite my problems with the book, I’ve got Lucia on the TBR stack and I’m quite keen to read it.

[Jackie Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Not at all, Herr Schreber. You do not seem cured at all. But I don’t imagine there is anything much I can do to cure you. I can bring you here and you can see how it is that everything is quite sensible and ordinary. I can help you see that your anxieties are exaggerations of very simple and commonplace problems that a man might have. […] But I cannot make you see what is in front of you.”

Playthings, by Alex Pheby, is written from the point of view of a retired German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, who, upon finding his wife collapsed on the floor of their parlour, becomes psychotically agitated. Paul suffered from what was then diagnosed as dementia praecox, which today is known as paranoid schizophrenia. Being taken inside the head of a man with this illness is disturbing, but the author does so with aplomb.

Paul Schreber was born in 1842, in Leipzig, Saxony. He was the son of a successful physician who founded and ran the Orthopaedic Institute in which Paul and his four siblings were raised. His father was a pedagogue, demanding that all in his home adhere to a strict routine. He raised his son to believe that boys should be manly and energetic, and that the poor or deformed, including those he treated at his institute, were lesser beings.

Paul Schreber suffered three major psychotic episodes in his life, describing the second in a memoir which became an influential book in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis thanks to its interpretation by Freud (the memoir has become a key text for students of psychology and modern and social and cultural history). Alex Pheby has taken the known facts and woven them into a compelling and compassionate account of how it would be to live with this illness.

Early on in the book, when Schreber is wandering the streets, he encounters members of the public whom he talks to from the confusion his reality has become. He frightens and appalls them, pushing them aside as insubstantial, inconsequential objects. He is intent on pursuing what to him seems a valid response to a skewed world.

At times this world becomes two dimensional; familiar people and places appear flimsy, ripples in space.

“His house was not there. Neither were the trees. No railings. No streetlamps. In their place were representations of these things. The objects […] they were changed […] they were all wrong. […] all these things were there, but when Schreber came close and put his cold fingertips to them they were smooth as pieces of letter paper and just as thin […] all utterly false.”

Schreber’s reality will often digress from that which those around him can see. People appear, who talk to him of his past, who know things that they should not. They remind him of incidents which he finds embarrassing or upsetting. They force him to acknowledge facts he has difficulty facing.

Much of what Schreber does and says during his time in hospital is wiped from his memory. He loses days, weeks, sometimes months at a time. During his more lucid moments he looks back on his life and the reader learns of his childhood, snapshots of significant moments. There are fleeting references to incidents which disturb his equilibrium, memories which he has buried in the basement of his mind.

Schreber’s family struggle to cope with what he has become. His daughter wishes to bring him home but his wife fears she would be unable to cope. She worries that he will write another memoir and embarrass them further. His first contained wild imaginings from his extreme delusional state, although he did not accept that they were delusions. He now denies that he ever had such thoughts.

This book allows the reader to see not only the patient’s struggles and fears but also the impotence of those around, however worthy their aims. Solutions acceptable to society involve locking the patient away, physically or pharmaceutically. With no cure available it is possible to empathise with all involved.

An incredible work of fiction, all the more fascinating for being based on an actual case. The writing is taut, intense, the everyday world a phantom which Schreber tries so desperately to attain. His disturbance of mind is not so much explained as experienced. This story is powerful and moving; I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the humanity behind mental illness.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Galley Beggar Press.

[Bookmuseuk]

As the stark, black cover suggests, the innocent-sounding title, Playthings, hides a dark and troubled history.

It refers to a statement by Daniel Paul Schreber, an early 20th Century German judge who documented his own psychotic breakdown, that those around him were not real, but merely ‘playthings of a lower God.’ Schreber’s account of his breakdown was used by Freud in the early development of psychoanalysis.

Playthings is the Pheby’s fictional account of Schreber’s third and final breakdown, and his incarceration, under increasingly disturbing conditions, in an asylum.

What we experience, through reading the book, is Schreber’s comparatively lucid moments, with little idea of how much time has passed between episodes. To begin with, we are inclined to believe his protestations that he is perfectly well again and should be allowed to go home. But then the sense of dislocation and loss of control intensifies. Is the mysterious figure called Alexander, who follows him round the asylum, a distillation of Schreber’s fears and fancies, or a projection of his own guilt? And what about the orderly, Muller? He seems solid enough to begin with, but then that line, too, begins to blur.

Pheby’s writing creates moments of intense focus, as Schreber’s senses home in on some trivial detail in his environment.

“The pattern of the blanket came toward him in ever closer magnification the longer he stared. Grids of red and green entwined like the mesh of the ether, intersections picked out in gold thread, and below that motif, the brown webbing around which each fibre was woven.”

Pheby uses the type of chapter headings that were common in 19th and early 20th C novels, that flag what is about to happen in the chapter. At first this seems like a device to make the books seem as if written contemporarily with the setting. But read them carefully and they have a more unsettling effect. At times they provide context that you’d miss if you skipped over them, allowing you to take a step back from Schreber’s direct experience.

Playthings’ historical setting adds other dimensions to the story. We see the early, faltering and ultimately failing attempts at enlightened treatment of mental illness. And we observe its social background – the hypermasculinity of Prussian society and its intolerance of those who fail to fit its mould, its growing anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiment.

A fascinating and unsettling read.

[Angela Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not politically engaged enough to have properly grasped the unearthing of the roots of the 'psychological structure of fascism' that other reviewers have suggested underpins this novel, but I am humanly and psychologically engaged and I found this deconstruction and disintegration of a human mind fascinating and horrifying. (And because Fascism, or any starkly imposed ism, can cause the mass deconstruction of human minds and attitudes, then I do understand the analogy other reviewers have drawn.)

This novel is based on the life of a German judge called Daniel Paul Schreber (whose name is unchanged in the novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_.... Schreber lived between 1842-1911 and suffered three mental breakdowns. When he recovered from the second one he wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness which was published in 1903. Freud read Schreber's Memoirs and thought Schreber should be appointed director of a mental hospital. Alex Pheby has turned Schreber's experiences into this novel.

Playthings is a disturbing fictionalisation of Schreber's mental disintegration, accompanied by his hallucinatory Jew (as he calls him) whose name is Alexander Zilberschlag (I can't help thinking that because these names mean defender and silversmith, perhaps they also mean ally and alchemist?) and I found the passages between Schreber and Zilbershlag the most compelling. Schreber thought he was turning into a woman and although - in the novel - this wasn't abundantly clear, at least it wasn't to me, there is a searing scene that suggests this delusion began at a very young age.

The other wonderful thing about this book is that it's published by Galley Beggar Press (in the UK) whose strapline is: 'A collection of quality new, contemporary and classic fiction from the British Isles'. Their existence, and the books they publish, are very good things indeed.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fictionalized account of the actual case of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), a distinguished judge in Leipzig, Germany, who developed paranoid psychosis in mid-life and was committed to a mental asylum on three different occasions. The final time in his retirement years of which he never returned home again, passing away in the asylum. Daniel Paul Schreber wrote and published Memoirs of My Nervous Illness where he discussed his bouts with mental illness. Schreber's book was influential to Sigmund Freud as a case study. Freud dubbed the illness 'paranoid schizophrenia' and referenced Schreber's repressed homosexual desires.

Dark, intense, exquisite. Alex Pheby places the reader inside the mind of Daniel Paul Schreber, giving the reader the perspective of an unreliable narrator. The story takes place in Schreber's later years as a retired judge. His time in the asylum will be his last.

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went into this book not really knowing anything about Daniel Paul Schreber and his memoirs of his mental illness, nor how influential to psychiatry they were. The book certainly stands alone as an interesting dive into a psychotic mind, but I wonder if it would have been more interesting to compare Pheby's approach to Schreber's mind with the patient's own thoughts (I will now likely go read the memoirs to do just that). As a work of fiction, it's a fascinating collection of thoughts only from Schreber's perspective, and yet also in the third person, so there's both a closeness and a distancing from his psychosis. Makes for a classic unreliable narrator situation, even though he's not actually narrating. The other characters -- doctors, family, etc -- come in almost dream-like scenes, always filtered through whatever state of mind Schreber is in when he receives them. So information, and plot, trickles out slowly and in an uncertain state. The weaving in of childhood memories is artfully done, and serves to disorient in a sense -- we're never quite sure how much time is passing, especially since the day-to-day activities are so seemingly benign. This is not a breezy read by any means, and the beginning moves slowly. But as you get to know Schreber's mind -- from a distance -- it's a fascinating look at schizophrenia from the inside, and beautifully written at that.

[José Ignacio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es unos de mis primeros libros de psicología que leo y no lo recomendaría para iniciarse en este "tipo" de novelas. Es muy lenta, siento que en muchos momentos el autor da por sentado ciertas cosas que como lector debería saber y no las se del todo, un ejemplo son los diferentes ataques que el juez tiene y los pasa por alto sin dar mucha explicación y dejándome en un suspenso que no me parece correcto. Aún asi aprendí algo acerca de lo que es tener una mente así y como se puede ir "empeorando", que era el objetivo con el que me acerque a la novela. El final me pareció correcto pero también contraproducente en cierto aspecto al mensaje que el autor quería dar.

[Juan Quibrera · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just read Freud instead.

[Michaël Wertenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.
Humane, yet unapologetic, look inside a diseased mind.
Strikes a good balance between humorous, creepy, suspenseful and endearing.
Colourful and fluid prose, a sympathetic protagonist and compelling secondary characters.

The reader, along with the protagonist, must try to parse reality from memory and delusion, wanting to, yet at the same time, wary or even fearful of what we may find.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Was all hope gone, for a man like this? For all of them? No! There was hope.” Alex Pheby’s novel Playthings, first published in 2015, is a striking and profoundly unsettling imaginative account of the third and final mental illness of Judge Paul Schreber, a key figure in the early studies of psychoanalysis. Few writers convey the horrifying, all-encompassing closing-in of mental illness in the world of fiction; in what has been described as a ‘neuronovel’, Pheby immerses his reader in the unravelling (and at times frighteningly lucid) mind of Schreber, as his strange behaviour first leads him to the care of medical professionals and then, once in their care, deeper into the pits, both of the system and of his own mind. The opening of the novel perfectly captures a sudden and initially imperceptible psychosis: “Schreber looked up and down the street. Things were much as they usually were. So what was the problem?” And, in prose as iridescent as it is terrifying, Pheby holds Schreber in the grip of his illness and refuses, either for Schreber’s sake or for ours, to let go. “From the ground he traced his fall through fizzing stars.” When Schreber is cogent, there is still a sense of real horror, an echo of a certain ideology that sees the madman as enlightened and awakened. “My eyes are accustomed to this darkness, but when light comes in… if light comes in… I can’t see properly now. You are a shape?” As with his novel Lucia, Playthings lingers awhile.

[Dave Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

from the author:
"In my most recent novel, Playthings, I use Schreber in different ways. I use him as means of making the experience of mental illness understandable to an audience for whom it is too often made mysterious, couched in medical terms, or given to us as a means of engendering shock, fear, and disgust. I use him to allegorise the reactions of the state to those things that it is threatened by. I use him to explore our relationship with our own memories, with our own histories, and to demonstrate how tenuously we exist in the present. I use him to look at the mechanics of the family, and to edge us towards understanding our obligations and the power we exert over each other. And I use him to quietly expose the traumas of my own life, and so allow myself to face them, in part."

The author does all of this quite well in this book, which was completely fascinating, but not recommended if you are looking for something uplifting.

[enricocioni · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, solid novel on mental illness. The first few chapters--where Schreber's perception of the world that surrounds him breaks down, and he is convinced that all the people he encounters are mere simulacra--are particularly effective and affecting. The prose is absolutely gorgeous throughout. And I don't think there's much that's particularly new about the way Pheby conveys the unreliability of Schreber's perspective--the appearance of characters that may or may not be imaginary, dialogue revealing that Schreber's awareness of the passing of time does not quite correspond to reality, flashbacks that bleed into the present--but Pheby does it all extremely well. Excited to get my hands on his imminent follow-up, a fictionalised account of the life of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce's daughter.

[Francisco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book, it is so unusual in its subject and structure; furthermore it is extremely well written, it really made me wonder why it is not more recognised and celebrated. Mental illness is a real mistery I figure, because I assume it has never been described by someone who suffers from it, and I mean serious disconnect with reality. Somehow Alex Pheby inmereses you onto that world, you can almost feel how the patient feels, the confusion, the total missunderstanding, life in an unreal world. It is harrowing. And it is written in such sensitive way, without sensationalism or disrepect. It is a difficult read for sure, because of the subject and because it had to be so, precisely because of the subject, but it is well wrothwhile the effort.

[Agustina Pilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pude leerla en español. La calificación es más que nada porque es un libro al que hay que entrar con un conocimiento previo del que carecía. Recién terminada la novela pude comprender a qué apuntaba Alex. Pero logra su cometido, meterse en la cabeza de alguien mentalmente inestable que confunde la realidad con el imaginario. No es una novela amena, pero si los temas relacionados a los problemas psiquiátricos te interesa dale una oportunidad.

[Fiore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es un libro desgarrador que nos cuenta desde el interior el padecimiento de una enfermedad mental. Desde un principio nos cuesta seguirle el hilo a ciertas cuestiones, no entendemos, y eso es porque el protagonista tampoco comprende. Lo más valioso del libro es el desarrollo de los personajes y como estos van cambiando sus actitudes con el protagonista a medida que va pasando el tiempo.
Sin más palabras, simplemente uno de los libros más bellos que he leído.

[Fiorella Marchesi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es un libro desgarrador que nos cuenta desde el interior el padecimiento de una enfermedad mental. Desde un principio nos cuesta seguirle el hilo a ciertas cuestiones, no entendemos, y eso es porque el protagonista tampoco comprende. Lo más valioso del libro es el desarrollo de los personajes y como estos van cambiando sus actitudes con el protagonista a medida que va pasando el tiempo.
Sin más palabras, simplemente uno de los libros más bellos que he leído.

[Mark Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really found this book to be interesting. Based on a real schizophrenic’s life —he actually wrote a disjointed memoir—this book compassionately provides a snapshot of an upper middle class husband and father trying to be cured in an asylum. Set in 1900-1910, the treatment is not state of the art. The protagonist is an unreliable narrator who has strange episode and who readers will back. Freud even studied this person’s illness. Worthwhile and educational read!

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this bit of a struggle after promising opening. Ultimately too controlled and structured for me, and relationship with characters and their experiences diminished by oppressive levels of reader manipulation.

[Aharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good if you like gothic.

[Lynn Somerstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Same moon

Poetic, touching, produces the thoughts and feelings of a mind sometimes delusional, sometimes clear and lucid, shining like the moon.

[Danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

An horrific subject, beautifully written. This intricate book deserves to be read slowly and aloud.

[Nataly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Esperaba mucho más

[Beli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Me costó leerlo. Al principio me resultó denso.
La historia está buena pero se torna confusa.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.0

[Marion Urch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Shreber is a recently retired High Court judge, a respectable member of fin de siècle Dresden society, the very embodiment of his age and class and time. One quiet day, his orderly life is thrown out of kilter. Small, inconsequential details become ominous: an unexpected, and emotionally charged, incident is stripped of all meaning. All is not as it should be, not at all. No longer able to keep his official persona intact, Shreber finds himself living in a world of facades. What is exposed is not only his own human frailty but the burgeoning fascism of the time. The novel draws upon the life of Paul Daniel Shreber, whose account of his descent into psychosis became a cornerstone of psychoanalytic study. Allusions to Freud’s case studies preface each chapter, lending the novel an air of authority, and underlining the sense of dislocation. It is into this gap that Shreber has fallen, between his external view of himself and the unformed subjective that he is so fearful of. To paraphrase Walt Whitman: we are large: we contain multitudes. The novel explores what means to live in a world without anchors. The pages are charged with immediacy and disquiet from the opening line. The author captures the stifling (and literally straitening) conventions of the time. This is a novel about perceived ideas around class and gender; most of all it is a novel about vulnerability. Shreber’s world falls apart when his wife displays human frailty. This is what he cannot tolerate; this is what he has been hiding from all his life. The novel chronicles his rapid disengagement from reality, the unraveling between perception and empathy. It is full of physical details, a puff of coal dust, the fuggy oiliness of an interior, the steaming pink tongue of a dog. Shreber, who has taken his superior status for granted, finds himself confined to a mental asylum, where the accoutrements of civilization are stripped away. The judge finds himself judged: he, who had once condemned a man to death with impunity, now finds himself answerable to the man’s brother, his jailor, the recalcitrant Muller. Everything he believed in is called into question. This is what happens when the careful stitching of identity falls apart, all the disparate selves emerge. Shreber escapes from the physical constraints of his elderly body and becomes a boy again climbing a tree. (He falls, of course.) With every lapse into childhood, he takes us closer to the soft unformed part of himself, to the child that was not allowed to be, to the impossibility of living up to his father’s eugenicist ideals. The novel is perceptive on the strictures of class, on the rules on how to address the lower orders. Shreber, a man who had taken the links between physiology and criminality for granted, finds the old order turned upside down. How fragile appearance’s are. He is not the superior man, after all. He is full of fear and revulsion, of the servants, of Jews, of perceived femininity, of the physically weak former patients of his father. Most of all, it is his own weakness that repulses him. His abhorrence of the internal feminine manifests in dreams of a womb leaking inside him: his recoiling from the poor, with their legs bowed with rickets, comes back to taunt him. The psychiatrist Rossler tries to reach out to him, but Shreber has slipped too far. This is a man stripped bare. All his losses have come back to him. Not only the loss of his own youth but of the children he never had. His questioning of own mortality is often gut wrenching and there is a terrible poignant tragedy in his remembrance of his wife’s miscarriages. As he struggles to maintain the last semblance of his authority within the brutal world of the institution, he discovers within himself all the things he most dreads. The playthings of the title are not only the dead children, but also the unformed, unloved aspect of himself. At heart, he is a malleable half-formed thing. The novel is published by Galley Beggar Press, who also broke new ground with Eimear McBride’s "A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing." Like that novel, Playthings challenges ideas around perception and reality, and perhaps inevitably, the narrative is stretched a little thinly at times. Nonetheless, Playthings is an extraordinary novel, a Kafkaesque page turner full of crystalline detail. It’s rare to read a book of such depth.