Reviewed by Seth Rogoff

Ivana Dobrakovová's English debut novel Bellevue is defined by rupture. The novel's narrator and protagonist Blanka leaves her native Slovakia to spend a few weeks volunteering at a center for people with physical disabilities near Marseilles, France. Nineteen-year-old Blanka is marked by a combination of worldliness and provincialism. She speaks (at least) three languages—French, English, and Slovak. She has traveled internationally before –spending part of the previous summer at some similar "camp" in France. At the same time, Blanka seems unsettled by the differences she encounters in Marseilles, especially the presence of "Arabs" who are among the other interns and around the French city. Blanka quickly befriends a group of Western Europeans—a Czech seventeen-year-old named Martina, the Italian Luca, the Swedish Ingeborg. The non-Westerners are either threatening or bothersome—the Romanian Elena, an older and unnamed Arab woman. A Slovene, Drago, exists on the borderline of friend and foe. This construct recalls Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, in which a society of tubercular convalescents represents a European society on the brink of disaster. Whether Bellevue contains such an overarching, Mannian conceit is open for productive discussion. 

The fragile Blanka has a difficult time adjusting to life at Bellevue. She struggles with depression—or at least this is how she describes her condition to Drago—and finds her work with the disabled physically and psychologically overwhelming. In a matter of a couple of days, her stress elevates to a level that compels her to find an outlet for her rising anxiety: self-harm, cutting into her arm. At the same time, the situation is not all dark for her. Despite her social anxieties, she quickly becomes part of the group of young interns. She takes comfort, for example, in her shared linguistic and cultural background with the Czech Martina, though the latter's vivaciousness and seductiveness also inspire jealousy. When Martina pairs up with Luca, Blanka follows her lead and cultivates a close, but generally platonic, relationship with Drago. This proves to be a tragic choice for her. Drago comes off as a kind of manipulative psychopath, pushing Blanka further down the spiral of insanity. Drago's advice, when Blanka first tells him of her history of mental illness and her thoughts about leaving Bellevue and returning home, is jarringly demonic. He tells her that leaving would be an escapist strategy. It might relieve the short-term anxiety, he says, but it would not confront the long-term problem. He proposes a dubious counterstrategy. Blanka summarizes his ideas: 

It would be better to do the opposite, go all the way, let myself be taken over by it, sink all the way to the bottom so that I could bounce back properly at last instead of resorting to medication that only suppresses the symptoms without ever treating the underlying cause . . . . Sure it was dangerous, drastic, nobody could tell what might happen, he couldn't guarantee anything, but it was a road to go down and he was prepared to help me . . . he'd stand by me, support me, I just had to trust him.     

Blanka embraces or relents to Drago's influence. She stays at Bellevue and with Drago (they are now sharing a room) despite the escalation of her symptoms. The first third of the novel ends with Blanka having an "epiphany" that becomes the core organizing principle of her subsequent psychological collapse: "we all hate each other."

The final two-thirds of Bellevue is an excruciating, relentless account of Blanka's spiral into psychosis. The intensity of Blanka's paranoia combined with her break from reality point to a condition very different from the self-described depression in the first part of the book. In any case, the rupture from the first part of the novel to the second is marked by Dobrakovová's most interesting element of formal experimentation. In this part of the novel, no sentence has a true end (no period), mirroring Blanka's feverish, looping, spiraling thought process. This formal strategy, despite its utterly suffocating effect, is superbly deployed—and wonderfully rendered into English by the highly-acclaimed translators Julia and Peter Sherwood. Throughout these one hundred and fifty pages, the reader begs for relief, for escape from this narrator, from her mind, from the Bellevue hospital (and maybe from Bellevue the novel?). There is no escape.

Bellevue introduces the talented Ivana Dobrakovová to the English-speaking world. The novel's depiction of mental illness will stick with the reader long after the book comes to an end. I'm not sure I've read a more striking representation of paranoid delusion. While elements of pacing, development, and balance are at times perplexing, they are no doubt meant to be—and it is a question of whether they ultimately work from a structural point of view.