It was very much a struggle for me. I couldn't decide between 2 and 3 stars cause there were some good/more comprehensible bits I enjoyed. I think the theme is interesting, and this story is important, but in the end, the style was too difficult and took too much away for this to be a good book, in my opinion.

Icy & piercing, but often darkly, existentially funny too. An apprehensive reading experience, always tip-toeing upon a knife-edge of terror as we follow Marthe navigating her experience in a psychiatric institution, which postpartum psychosis has rendered into a labyrinth with potential traps laid at every turn. There were stretches where this vaguely evoked for me the experience of reading a detective novel, trying to suss out, sentence-to-sentence, what is a red herring & what is a clue to propel movement forward.

Eliot is often treated as the hero that "rescued" the great Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, but Coleman is more deserving of the credit. Through her friendship, advocacy & editorial insistence, Coleman helped shapes Barnes' original manuscript into something publishable (she was the one who initially contacted Eliot). And if anything can be said to anticipate the singular Nightwood, well, a case could certainly be made for this.

"In the late afternoon when the trees were growing into deserted stalks of winter she began to groan, not as other had groaned but wearily. She groaned and expanded her lungs and out again it came. She lay on her back and there was no movement only the sound of her lungs. She is going to die they said. I know that sound said Mrs. Welsh."

I've read my fair share of tales of mental institutionalization written by those who actually experienced such and lived to tell the tale. Frame, Plath, Kaysen, and now Coleman: different times, different continents, different levels of pathos and creativity and skill involved in the expression of their individual experiences. While I read Plath at a key moment in my life and nearly broke myself upon her words, Frame is definitely my preferred, with Kaysen and Coleman roughly on level with each other. There's a great deal that could be written on the intersection of history with medicine with gender, along with some very small mentions of races and religions outside of the WASP norm, but I should have taken it as a clear and present sign when the introduction spent a great deal of time on the author's bio, and much of that namedropping various famous early 20th century Euro figures (I will admit to being very keen on the mentions of E. Goldman and D. Barnes, but I can't say Coleman is comparable to either of them). There is definitely much experimental text to be found, which gorgeously blooms at least once in my estimation, and I did find the main character's sympathy towards her institutionalized compatriots (in addition to her husband's sympathy towards her), especially during the endgame narrative, to paint an unorthodox, and likely all the more accurate, picture of mentally ill comradery. However, the words for the most part went by with very little in regards to spikes in quality in either high or low, so, in terms of a first 2020 read, this could've been better, but it also could've been a lot worse.

Now she knew she must be well, she wanted to be alone.

Acquiring this was quite the bit of luck, as I was at a sale that I've only been to twice in the last few years that, apparently, had been recently donated to by someone who was a regular subscriber to Virago Modern Classics. In terms of the work itself, it took me a bit to center myself in the narrative, but I suppose being disoriented by a novel centered around the experience of mental illness is par on course. Beyond that, the organization was rather conventional, chronologically speaking, and the number of characters wasn't too unwieldy, especially when the main character's trajectory from the more dehumanizing sections of the institution to another cut the regularly appearing cast down to size. The story itself was a series of snapshots of six hour baths, a baby that may or may not be dead, disregard of public nudity, trips to the cinema, and reflection on the self as Jesus Christ, plus a rather regular cycle of quick escalations into violence that don't always, judging by the narrative's trajectory, indicate a backsliding in the estimation of the institute's employees. Experimental text abounds, especially when it comes to disregarding punctuation, and the dynamic between main character and husband is rather more sexually charged, and in a positive, mutually affirming sense to boot (leastwise as was allowable by the husband's observation of the main character's compromised state of mind), than I'm used to in a story hailing from this period. So, definitely a unique work, and it's hopefully already spawned some interesting analysis in the literary realms of academia. However, Coleman's status definitely rides the coattails of some of her compatriots a tad hard when juxtaposing her current literary status and her accomplishments. So, with this, her one and final novel, under my belt, I'd say my time with her is through.

As ill-fitting such a treatment may be, in the common convention of Virago Modern Press publications at any rate, I feel this would have benefited a tad from some kind of more in depth inclusion of the context of postpartum infection, as the history of that pretty little tale of obscene pride and gendered suffering bears worth repeating whenever anyone thinks themselves too high and mighty to ever be the cause of abject misery and death. In terms of institutionalized medical history horror stories, this is comparably horrific to the history of gynecology, with the added irony that the man who most notably, leastwise in historical record, was the earliest in proposing a solution to the largely man-made plague was widely ridiculed to the point of him entering a mental institution himself. In light of that, I think this work suffers from having such widely esteemed comrades, both in terms of its history and the writer's own contemporaries. Both would be extremely hard to measure up to, and Coleman, honestly, is no Frame, or even Plath. So, to anyone who's interested in older works by women that cover some more unconventional themes (although all my namedrops have been women, and there's something to be said about that too) regarding mental illness with little to no neurotypical nonsense, save when it is rightfully derided and even rebelled against, here's a good book to peruse. Thanks to my reading challenges, I'll be reading a great deal of 1930's women's lit, so I'm looking forward to exploring any commonalities that I happen to pick up on. For now, it's time to move on.

They came like fluttering phantoms out of dimly lighted corridors, and all at once she plunged with two hands into the keys and came swiftly from beneath her hands the portion of the dream she had been keeping. Gold and black and even, the full crescendo of the dream, up the keys and into the black beyond. She leaned her body to the keys and bent her head above them and from the wide spaces between her fingers burst forth yellow birds to the sun.