A simple intervention by Yael Inokai

A  simple intervention by Yael Inokai

Swiss fiction

Original title – Ein simpler Eingriff

Translator – Marielle Sutherland

Source – subscription book

I am back to the latest book from Peirene and a book from a coming Swiss writer, Yael Inokai; this is her third novel and ias the first to be published in English (don’t get me started on publishing books in the order they came out ) so we have a couple more books at some point. She has won several prizes, such as the Swiss Literature Prize and the Anne Seghers Prize (this book won the prize). This book is one of those books that have themes about females getting operated on by men. What medicine can do, love, and what happens when the world you are in is far different than it seems at the start of the book. It has been compared to Attwood and Ishiguro for making a dystopic tale.

The brain is a map. Everything I am is located there. I grew into my profession with this image in my head. It made sense. Tumours crush optic nerves, leading to blindness.

Neurological diseases erode people’s memories, their lan-guage, their motor skills, little by little, until their hands can’t even keep a grip any more. These diseases can be located. Why should it be any different with psychological disorders? Why shouldn’t we be able to remove these too, and release people into a life worth living?

It took no time at all to complete the intervention. We were usually in theatre no longer than an hour. It was simple, and like everything simple, it had taken a long time to develop and refine. The right tools, the right hands that knew how to use the tools, the right voices to guide the procedure. And the failures, of course. No one liked to talk about those. But failures drove development.

The op helps people cope it says !

The book is set in an unnamed town in Switzerland. We meet a nurse who works at a state-of-the-art hospital and performs special operations to free people of their psychological problems. We see this all through the eyes of Meret; she loves her job and is a rising star in the hospital, so much so that she has been given the job of aiding those in the operating theatre to make sure the patients go through the op ok. But the two grow close when a new nurse, Sarah, is in the dorm. The only problem is Sarah questions the op that in some ways looks pretty similar to the old-fashioned lobotomy, and it is strange it is mainly female patients in for this treatment and the outcomes it can have. So when an operation on a patient called Mariella goes horribly wrong, she starts to question her job, and the world around her changes. It is how this procedure has dealt a blow to one woman and made the other wary, and the one between them is now questioning her own part in all this. There is some hope with a wonder drug that may help, but it answers: is this the way to treat mental health?

I waited for her. Sometimes I lay in bed in our room and waited for her.

I’d always tried to bundle together my days off to give me enough time to travel home. This didn’t always work out. Sometimes I had the odd day left over – not enough to make the trip.

Once I began sharing a room with Sarah, I stayed in bed longer than usual on these days. I wanted to see her, exchange a glance, a few words. I wanted to know she really existed, the woman who lived in this room without being here. The more time that passed after our first encounter, the more I seemed justified in doubting it had happened at all.

When Sarah moves in she is drawn to her

I love the fact it tackles the question of how we treat mental health. It is much easier to talk about one’s mental health issues. I think most people struggle with their mental health, and it shows those who need meds and maybe life hasn’t been kind. But will this one procedure work, and why is it just a woman seemingly having the op. I was reminded of the doctors that in the fifties and still some places would do a lobotomy in seconds, not gathering the long-term horrors it would incur. It has a love story at its heart but also how women are treated by medicine. I think we’d all love a simple op that could sort out our mental health issues, but there is no such cure. One must question why the op is so popular, who is getting the treatment, the moral questions around that, and how love can change people’s view of their world. It has a feel of what could become something to make a dystopic world without ever feeling too unreal in how it is portrayed. Do you have any books that deal with Female mental health issues? Ill add the cover soon it wasn’t let me up load it at the moment