Botanik des Wahnsinns

When a mix-up during the eviction of his mother's flat results in everything of value being thrown into the incinerator, the narrator is literally left with nothing but the rubbish from his own family history. How could it have come to this? The narrator looks at his family's biography: a family tree of madness. His grandmother bipolar, twelve suicide attempts, his grandfather a regular customer at Steinhof, his mother an alcoholic, his father depressed. And he looks back on his own path: a childhood in Munich's working-class neighbourhood. The early fear of going mad. Fleeing from his family to faraway New York. Years in Vienna with Freud in the coffee house. And how he finally ends up in an asylum after all - as a psychologist. While working with patients, he learns that a person is always more than their illness, that listening is more important than diagnosing. Above all, however, he soon has to ask himself what a normal person is supposed to be. A family history that has got out of hand? A picaresque novel? A lesson in empathy? Leon Engler's debut is all this and more, a tender liberation, the story of a reconciliation. "Irresistible. Light-footed and serious, tender and brutal, ironic and honest." SIRI HUSTVEDT.