cover image The Sickness Called Man

The Sickness Called Man

Ferdinando Camon. Marlboro Press, $18.95 (177pp) ISBN 978-0-910395-90-8

At first this solipsistic Italian novel seems like a sendup of analysis and analysands, with details of the therapeutic process magnified as in a hallucinatory comedy. Camon ( The Fifth Estate ), however, has a solemn agenda. The first-person narrator describes his experiences with various therapists, from the pompous to the gifted, all of whom he consulted in an effort to understand his mysterious maladies. Along the way Camon dissects the etiquette of analysis, discourses on analytic silence, interprets a series of dreams, etc., but his observations become secondary to his social critique. Man is the corpus delicti. ``Analysis is history on trial,'' he argues, concluding that we are all orphans: ``I'd lost the Mother Church, I didn't have a Father political Party.'' But Camon's protagonist is far from a universal figure--for example, he represents feminist advances as the losses of males--and the leap from his individual psyche to the so-called modern condition is improbable at best. (Mar.)