Vlado Žabot

The Succubus is easily summarised: Valent Kosmina is going mad. The story seems to begin just as his odd habits are giving way to actions that are downright bizarre and his thoughts to the floridly psychotic.

Despite having dealt with the mentally ill and having read first-hand accounts of mental illness,I always felt an otherness, something alien and incomprehensible, in psychosis. Succubus is probably so disturbing because Zabot so vividly describes an extension of symptoms I recognise: Having been delirious, I know what it is to have irrational revelations about connections between things; I've been so tired as to have fleeting halllucinations; under prolonged stress I've found my thoughts forever turning to the same subject; because I was once 13 years old, I know what it is to be abnormally self-conscious. It's no great leap from these to ideas of reference, recurrent hallucinations and fixed delusions. It seems to me quite an accomplishment for a writer, and one of fiction at that, to make an illness like Kosmina's seem close to home.

And Zabot uses no drama beyond that in Kosmina's mind to do so--no public ructions, no straitjackets, no grand lunatic gestures. To me the most disquieting, even frightening, episode is simply Valent's visit to his apartment tower's attic on a stifling summer afternoon, where he is unsettled by the roof supports, by evidence of others' visits, and by the presence of the caretaker, who is guiltily eating something unnamable. (How much of this is real and how much delusional is left unsaid: the narration is 3rd-person but the events are related from Kosmina's viewpoint.)

The book is oddly timeless and placeless; the account as a whole, though not the prose, has a rather old-fashioned feel and the city and characters could be anywhere, though there's something ineffably central/east European about them. I think that if you liked Topor's The Tenant or The Watchers by Maclean you'd like this, though it's less the page-turner than either. Have a go--when others start discussing British literary fiction you'll be able to put a stop to it by casually drawling, 'Actually, I've just read a rather superior little book by a Slovenian chap. . .'… (meer)