Is the inconceivable possible? Do Anna’s delusions describe Josy’s last days? Reluctantly Viktor agrees to take on Anna’s therapy in a last attempt to uncover the horrible truth behind his daughter’s disappearance ……
What can I tell you about this psychological thriller? I could tell you that it ticks all of these boxes:
a) It takes the reader right to the centre of a deluded schizophrenic mind.
b) It engenders compulsive until early-hours-of-the-morning page-turning without recourse to gory violence.
c) When the pieces of the jigsaw began to fit together, I simply didn’t believe it and not because of any implausibility.
d) As a result, while I foresaw one major plot twist, I didn’t anticipate the final one.
e) The only disappointment was that I reached the end so quickly. (But what am I to expect when I refused to put the book down. I can be so contrary sometimes!)
I could tell you all that, but, instead, suffice to say that this is the best psychological thriller I’ve ever read …..
….. and that my attempt at not buying more German books ended 5 minutes after finishing it with one click to buy Fitzek’s 2nd novel translated into English. (My bank manager thanked his lucky stars that I’m not reading German originals. I think Fitzek’s backcatalogue runs to 6 more ….)
for the novel and one extra for the acknowledgement
First and foremost, I’d like to thank you, the reader. Not because I have to, but because I think we share a certain solidarity. Reading and writing are solitary and intensely personal activities, and I’m honoured to be the recipient of the most valuable gift in the world: your time. Especially if you’ve made it all the way through to these acknowledgements.
Maybe you’d like to tell me what you thought of the book. You can contact me via …….
Well, I’m not going to refuse an offer like that. So I took emailed the author and asked him for a German crime week recommendation. Within a couple of hours I had a response. (What a nice guy!) ” The best German psychothriller I ever read was “Der stille Herr Grenardy” by Petra Hammesfahr. It is the first German thriller I read in one night.”
Effi Briest - Theodor Fontane (Readalong 
The Beauty Room - Regi Claire
My Mother's Lover - Urs Widmer
The Help - Kathryn Stockett
The Rule of Four - Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
Noir - Robert Coover
The Taint of Midas - Anne Zouroudi
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
The Duel - Anton Chekhov
The Duel - Heinrich von Kleist
Gillespie and I - Jane Harris
State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
CIty of Dreadful Night - Peter Guttridge
Shadow Sister - Simone van der Vlugt
A Far Cry From Kensington - Muriel Spark
The Assault - Harry Mulisch
Next World Novella - Matthias Politycki
The Water Theatre - Lindsay Clark
Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen
The Liberation of Celia Kahn - J David Simons
Nocturnes - Kazuo Ishiguro
Hotel Du Lac - Anita Brookner
I recommend Der stille Herr Genardy in my post.
It seems we have two very different reactions to this book (you and Emma).
I will have to find out for myself, lucky I have it. I got another one “Seelenbrecher”, I wonder if that’s the second you have.
How come you give the best psychological thriller 4 and not 5 stars?
I debated the 4/5 star issue with myself, Caroline, and decided that no matter how good Therapy is, I couldn’t rate it a literary masterpiece and put it on the same pedestal as Effi Briest, for example.
I thought that was the reason but I think then no crime novel could ever get 5 stars. I would rather apply the same as for hotels. Everyone knows that a 5* hotel in Switzerland isn’t the same as one in…. (not going to name a country or people may be offended)
You get my drift.
The second novel is Splinter – Splitter in the original German.
I guess my response to this book was quite the opposite. It’s the first book I’ve read since I started the blog that I didn’t want to review. I didn’t want to waste time on it and I only finished it because I was stuck in a hospital and I had nothing else to do.
The style is just plain awful (maybe that’s the French translation…) and I thought that there were too many mental diseases. It sounded like a recipe: well, I have all these interesting illnesses, how am I going to cook them into a book? The psychology of the characters (their description, their motives, their personnal history) wasn’t developed enough.
That said, even if the plot didn’t work on me at all, I perfectly understand that other readers will find it gripping. Most of the reviews on the French Amazon are 3 stars and more. That must be me.
Something else, you’re right, the acknowledgements in the book are nice, the writer does sound like a nice person.
PS: A five stars crime fiction novel to me would be more The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson or, in a different style, Roman Blood by Steven Saylor.
Emma, I haven’t read either of your recommendations. Onto the wishlist they go.
As for Therapy, I can imagine that if the plot, or the central conceit doesn’t work for you, then the book will just disintegrate.
I accept the fractured story line and the distanced characterisation as stylistic choices and indicators of the narrator’s state of mind. The book refers at one point to his “single moment of clarity”. Which doesn’t mean that the rest of the book is obscure in any way – surreal in places, for sure, but the surreal images in Larenz’s head provided the clues to what was happening in the real world.
Caroline,
Chandler does deserve a 5 stars rating, for the plot and the literary qualities of his style. Even if it’s crime fiction.
Emma, I was unclear in my comment. I would give 5 stars to a crime novel, literary or not, I think you can’t compare
As for Chandler he is one of my favourite authors (and I don’t mean crime), so, yes, I would give 5 stars to all of his crime novels and 5+ to The Long Goodbye.
I ve not read any german crime fiction yet so this is another to add to the list ,all the best stu
[...] the Joys and Morphinism) Fauser (The Snowman) Feuchtwanger (The Oppermanns) Fitzek (Therapy (1) (2)) Fontane (Effi Briest Readalong: Week 1/Week 2/Week 3 ) Frisch (Homo Faber) Funke (Inkheart) [...]