An Infinite Sadness

Brazilian writer Xerxenesky’s weighty and somber English-language debut plumbs the mysteries of the unconscious and the universe. During WWII, psychiatrist Nicholas kept up his practice in Vichy France and did not concern himself with “political or historical questions” as the puppet government deported Jews. Now, in 1950s Switzerland with his wife, Anna, a science journalist, he succumbs to the depressive feelings he is tasked with alleviating in his patients at a remote alpine sanatorium. “Might melancholia be contagious?” Nicholas asks himself, an implicit reference to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, also set in a Swiss sanitorium, which Nicholas incidentally found “deathly boring.” He tries to break through to his patients, who include a “terrible shaken hulk” of an American soldier, a woman guilty over her work for the Los Alamos project, and a schizophrenic proclaiming Satan as his master. Anna, meanwhile, takes a position as an in-house journalist for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). There’s a static quality to the drama and characters, who often come across as philosophizing mouthpieces. Still, the novel roils with ideas about the ethics and efficacy of various psychological treatments and the riddles of quantum physics, the latter of which Anna reports on at CERN. This case study of postwar melancholia is worth the reader’s time on the couch. (Oct.)