In an unnamed city shrouded in mist, Valent Kosmina is a retiree living quietly yet discontentedly with his doped-up, TV-addicted wife. To escape the claustrophobia of home and city, he masquerades as a man of means and takes to spending his nights strolling through an opulent suburb--but when news comes of a gruesome murder on his new turf, Kosmina fears that he may be a suspect. Increasingly anxious and paranoid, Kosmina begins to see a mysterious dark-haired girl following him everywhere--and as this succubus takes hold of him, Kosmina finds his familiar city becoming indistinguishable from the landscape of his own nightmares.from The Succubus This was hardly the first time Valent Kosmina had been unsettled by the thought that someone had pushed or seduced him--or that he had himself, perhaps out of clumsiness or carelessness, simply strayed--into a situation that would later be difficult to get out of. This idea, this fear, was in fact quite familiar to him, and naturally it unnerved him, but never to the degree that he couldn't shrug it off. A sensible person, after all, manages in one way or another to per- suade himself that he is all right, that he is sufficiently in control of himself, and that life will therefore run its course, peacefully and properly, to its bitter end.
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Very well-written. Very disturbing.
Oct 15 2012
By monica
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
The Succubus is easily summarised: Valent Kosmina is going mad. The story seems to begin just as his odd habits are giving way to actions that are downright bizarre and his thoughts to the floridly psychotic.
Despite having dealt with the mentally ill and having read first-hand accounts of mental illness,I always felt an otherness, something alien and incomprehensible, in psychosis. Succubus is probably so disturbing because Zabot so vividly describes an extension of symptoms I recognise: Having been delirious, I know what it is to have irrational revelations about connections between things; I've been so tired as to have fleeting visual and auditory halllucinations; under prolonged stress I've found my thoughts forever turning to the same subject; because I was once 13 years old, I know what it is to be absurdly self-conscious. It's not great leap from these to ideas of reference, recurrent hallucinations and fixed delusions. It seems to me quite an accomplishment for a writer, and one of fiction at that, to make an illness like Kosmina's seem close to home.
And Zabot uses no drama, beyond that in Kosmina's mind, to do so--no public ructions, no straitjackets, no grand lunatic gestures. To me the most disquieting, even frightening, episode is simply a visit to the apartment tower's attic on a stifling summer afternoon, when Valent is unsettled by the roof supports, by evidence of others' visits, and by the presence of the caretaker, who is guiltily eating something unnamable. (How much of this is real and how much delusional is left unsaid: the narration is 3rd-person but the events are related from Kosmina's viewpoint.)
The book is oddly timeless and placeless; the account as a whole, though not the prose, has a rather old-fashioned feel and the city and characters could be anywhere, though there's something ineffably central/east European about them. I think that if you liked Topor's The Tenant or The Watchers by Maclean you'd like this, though it's less the page-turner than either. Have a go--when others start discussing American literary fiction you'll be able to put a stop to it by casually drawling, 'Actually, I've just read a rather superior little book by a Slovenian chap. . .'
Despite having dealt with the mentally ill and having read first-hand accounts of mental illness,I always felt an otherness, something alien and incomprehensible, in psychosis. Succubus is probably so disturbing because Zabot so vividly describes an extension of symptoms I recognise: Having been delirious, I know what it is to have irrational revelations about connections between things; I've been so tired as to have fleeting visual and auditory halllucinations; under prolonged stress I've found my thoughts forever turning to the same subject; because I was once 13 years old, I know what it is to be absurdly self-conscious. It's not great leap from these to ideas of reference, recurrent hallucinations and fixed delusions. It seems to me quite an accomplishment for a writer, and one of fiction at that, to make an illness like Kosmina's seem close to home.
And Zabot uses no drama, beyond that in Kosmina's mind, to do so--no public ructions, no straitjackets, no grand lunatic gestures. To me the most disquieting, even frightening, episode is simply a visit to the apartment tower's attic on a stifling summer afternoon, when Valent is unsettled by the roof supports, by evidence of others' visits, and by the presence of the caretaker, who is guiltily eating something unnamable. (How much of this is real and how much delusional is left unsaid: the narration is 3rd-person but the events are related from Kosmina's viewpoint.)
The book is oddly timeless and placeless; the account as a whole, though not the prose, has a rather old-fashioned feel and the city and characters could be anywhere, though there's something ineffably central/east European about them. I think that if you liked Topor's The Tenant or The Watchers by Maclean you'd like this, though it's less the page-turner than either. Have a go--when others start discussing American literary fiction you'll be able to put a stop to it by casually drawling, 'Actually, I've just read a rather superior little book by a Slovenian chap. . .'
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