Stefan Merrill Block

This is extraordinary account of a man's psychiatric illness, and the effect that his incarceration in a mental hospital near Boston, greater and more far-reaching than the man's condition, had on he himself, his wife and his family.

Though fiction, this account is very strongly based on the life of the author's grandfather, via family stories, his own memeories, and the accounts he has been able to find.

There are many characters who, through the author's compassionate depiction of them, we come to view sympathetically. There is Frederick himself, and his wife Katharine. There is Professor Schultz, whose life's work is about recording the language which only he is able to hear. And there is Canon, whose autocratic and ultimately disastrous period as Director of the mental hospital where Frederick is incarcerated, is in the end written about with some compassion.

This is a powerful, well-written and compelling book. A must-read.… (més)