Culture. Eat it
17 November 2015
Catastrophic love stories marked by sexual obsession have been my professional interest for many years: the psychiatrist Peter Cleave opens with these words ‘Asylum’ by Patrick McGrath. The story of the meeting between Edgar Stark and Stella Raphael.
It all starts in an ancient criminal victorian asylum in England in 1959 when Stella, the wife of the deputy director, will be overwhelmed by the passion for Edgar, a sculptor there detained for femicide. Their lives are intertwined and when the reader thinks he’s got to see the end of this “sick love”, when he thinks that good and evil have stopped fighting, when the order seems to be restored, love and madness go hand in hand instead.
There are people who go madness because of love, and others that despite their insanity they keep loving.
The protagonists of this story seem to have no strengths, it seems like the writer wants to deprive us of any fixed point, to ask us to not attach to any of them: a frustrated wife, a crazy lover, a weak husband, a doctor apparently detached, a mother-in-law stereotyped. This way only we will live the same world of Stella, an asylum – where you can feel at home but also be a prisoner; the cage, in which Stella decides to live to feel loved and protected paradoxically, is called Edgar. Yes, love. Let’s talk about this feeling that you can’t dominate. How would you describe it? asks Peter – Stella: If you do not know I can not explain it. I wish you a good psychiatric session.
Time of the reading: about three nights
Photography: Sara Cartelli.
© The Eat Culture.
Author
Bio:
She is an art historian, optimistic and empathic by nature. She imagines a world where sow kindness enjoying the little things. She's in love with stories since she was a child, for the Eat Culture she eats books and arts. Per aspera ad astra says the only tattoo on her skin. It reminds her that the road that leads to her dreams is not always easy but that she never gives up.
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