The Gravity of Love

The book is mainly set in the hospital and grounds of Beckomberga, a Swedish Psychiatric hospital, built in 1932 to house mentally ill patients. It was to become one of the largest in Europe and was "home" to some 2,000 mentally ill patients in its heyday. As the author points out in the first half of the twentieth century, society seems to have extended the meaning of the word "insane" : so that the numbers locked up in mental Institutions in Sweden grew some eight fold. A sad statistic.Mentally ill included addicts (alcohol or other drugs) deemed to pose a risk to themselves and to other members of society. The hospital closed in 1995 as attitudes changed as to the best way to treat mental illness and new medication became available. To this day mental disorder and its treatment are not hot dinner party topics.The book is narrated largely through the eyes of Jackie, who is the daughter of one of the Hospital's patients, Jim: an alcoholic absolutely obsessed with suicide. The book describes the effects of mental disorders on patients, relations and the staff.For me the word "gravity" in the title came to mean the impact that love for a family member suffering mental illness usually had on their family and close friends. The book describes the high hopes for the Hospital when it was opened through to its ignominious closure. In so many ways a story of failure: vast numbers of patients who turned to addiction to relieve their mental problems were hidden away from "civilised" society without any apparent coherent treatment of their problems. Some patients (and staff) spent most of their lives there.This novel deals eloquently with the subject matter of the Institutionalised insane and forces the reader to ask some awkward questions of themselves. The author also poses the unanswered question as to how society should deal with mental illness.From the start it has to be pointed out that this novel is unusual. Unusual in every way. Structure, timeline, narration, language, change of setting and emotions explored. The author fully tests the reader's attentiveness, as you can never coast along in a safe comfort zone. Stridsberg seems determined to make the reader think and to do so she deploys a number of interesting writing techniques.For a start the author deploys the technique of unbalancing the reader by flashing forward and back through time. This technique supports the apparent madness of the patients as they tend to flash back and forth through insanity. Stridsberg also changes the narrator just to add to the complexity.As the novel progressed I found myself starting to ask myself the question hwho was actually insane? The incarcerated, sectioned insane or those who incarcerated them? How is sanity measured? The patients ask deep piercing questions to which the medical staff and relatives have no answer. The questions they pose are valid yet ones which "sane" society steers clear of. It makes you think.The Institutions lead not just to the institutionalisation of the patients but also their relatives and staff. Relationships seem like butterflies: here one minute, gone the next.I mentioned the eloquence of the novel. At times the prose is so delightful it is poetic.Olof , a patient, atop a tower contemplating suicide looks around and notes that " the night is clear: the stars, pinprick holes letting in light from another world, a powerful radiance glinting beyond the black.." That is but one example I have quoted, the book is full of such wonderful prose.Humour abounds too. Jim, an alcoholic hell-bent on suicide comes up regularly with ever more fantastic and ridiculous ways to end his life: in one section he suggests that the kitchen oven would be best as at least the family would find his body easily. In one scene, the main narrator Jackie when asked , "Do you smoke, Jackie?" replies, "Not yet". The humour maintains a balance appropriate to the serious nature of the book's theme.The author packs every emotion you can think of into this novel affecting the patients, relatives and carers. Many patients become forgotten and have eventually been incarcerated for so long that they cannot think or contemplate a life outside the walls and grounds of the hospital. The same is also true of some carers and family.I was left at the end with many questions unanswered. Perhaps the answer lay hidden in a passage I had missed in the book. But of course in reality there are no easy answers to some questions and I assume that was the message that the author was getting across.This is not the easiest book to read nor to review but makes in many ways for compelling reading after you've started. It is not a book for everyone. It is an unsettling book with no formal structure imposed on it. But the delightful prose the book contains alone makes this is a book worth reading. Whilst not a book likely to top the bestseller charts it is one which possesses an almost ethereal feel to it which will preserve its relevance to society for a long time. A sad book yet full of hope. Try and see for yourself.(My review was based on an eBook file provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley. My review is totally independent.)

It’s not always easy to follow this powerful but very disjointed novel about mental health set in Sweden. The narrative is fragmented and shifts about in time and place, which I found had an alienating effect in spite of the harrowing subject matter. Its exploration of mental illness, suicide and alcoholism and the effect on both sufferer and those around him or her raised some very important and pertinent issues but I couldn’t engage with the characters and thus found the book interesting rather than absorbing. Much of the book is set in and around a Stockholm psychiatric hospital called Beckomberga, built in 1932 at a time when such institutions seemed in the best interest of those suffering from any sort of mental instability. Closed in 1995, it is to be debated whether what replaced these institutions is any more successful in helping people. Be that as it may, overall this is a readable and accessible account of people whose lives have been shattered and whilst it offers no solutions, it does at least open up the subject to a wide audience.

I finished this book quite a while ago and have tried several times to start my review but it just didn't come. I have decided that I am just going to start typing and see where my thoughts take me.I guess that the book for me reflects the mental state of some of the characters as it flits about in time quite a bit, going off on tangent after tangent before returning to where it left off. In that respect it is quite a hard book to read especially when you couple that with it being quite graphic in parts specifically when it talks about mental health. It's very "as it is" in attitude which, at times, is very full on and hard to take. Especially if, like me, you are typical British and throw the - "stiff upper lip, we don't talk about feelings" into the mix. A bit of a cultural divide there maybe?Usually I start and finish a book in a couple of days maximum. I couldn't with this book as I found it quite heavy going - mostly due to the subject matter rather than the writing or translation. I think it took me about a week and a half all told and that's with reading other books in between.To be honest, and I try to be, I found it quite repetitive but then that follows the narrative and fits the tone. Life in a mental hospital is repetitive by nature, alcoholics fall off the wagon in cycles, suicidal thoughts come and go in waves and so, in that respect, I found the repetition to be wholly congruent.As time goes on, we see how Jim's actions affects others in his life, mainly his daughter's and it's through her eyes that we see what happens to Jim, especially how it affects her own life and subsequent relationships.We also witness the collapse of the inpatient regime and the effect that "care in the community" has on the patients and staff alike - some of whom had worked/lived in the hospitals for many years.In among all that doom and gloom we have some wonderful poetic language that really deserves to be savoured. I am not usually a fan of this sort of stuff (I much prefer plain speaking) I have to admit to finding it very fitting here and not at all intrusive nor distracting.This is definitely not a book I would recommend as a pleasurable read but if you want something of this ilk. that'll say it as it is in a very poignant way then maybe give it a go. In a way, I'm glad I read it and I am still thinking about it two weeks after finishing it and that very rarely happens.My thanks go to NetGalley and the Publisher for the chance to read an advance copy of this book.