What Kingdom

Summary

In honest, crackling investigations of the psychiatric system and the young people trying to find their way, Gråbøl's soaring debut offers a critique of institutionalization and an urgent recalibrating of the language and conceptions of care.

"I'm not inarticulate, but I leave language to the room around me," says Fine Gråbøl's nameless narrator as she dreams of furniture flickering to life in the room she occupies at a temporary psychiatric care unit for young adults. Our narrator is obsessed with the way items rise up out of their thingness, assuming personalities and private motives. She also cannot sleep and practices her daily routines with the urgency of survival—peeling a carrot, drinking prune juice—all an acutely calibrated exploration into having a home.

Structured as a series of intimate vignettes like those of Olga Ravn, What Kingdom thrums with the swirling voices of this shared home. Hector blares Michael Jackson from the recreation room and recalls a past in Peru when his psychoses were treated with exorcism. The town would shake the devil out of his small, teenage body before he was relocated to Denmark. Or Marie, who has lived in the temporary unit since she was eighteen, has no idea that her mother lives just four floors below in a permanent care unit.