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The Listener by Shira Nayman

The Listener is set in a mental hospital just after the Second World War and focuses on the interaction between the director and one of the patients, a man called Bertram Reiner, who admitted himself with a severe case of battle fatigue. He is charismatic and brilliant, sometimes seeming more like the doctors than the patients, and in him, Dr Harrison finds the most challenging patient of his career. His sessions with Reiner leave the doctor slipping into a frightening but also strangely enlivening existence that blurs the boundaries between sanity and insanity.

Dr Harrison’s own personal live is not idyllic either and he has his own inner demons to fight. As the story unfolds, not only does Bertram’s history become clearer, so does the doctor’s. In his sessions, Bertram also uses metaphors and contradicts himself making it hard to determine what actually occurred in his life before he came to the hospital. It is clear though that he appears to be afraid of his brother, who he insists is a murderer. When a package then arrives from his brother’s wife in Denmark, it shows that Bertram may have some cause to be concerned about his brother’s intentions.

The Listener is a riveting tale of madness and passion. Shira Nayman slowly reveals mysteries in both men’s lives, drawing readers into this intriguing tale of two men whose lives were both changed forever because of world wars. Shira Nayman also describes the incredible cruelty that Nazi German police dished out to Jewish civilians in occupied Denmark. She uses her background as a clinical psychologist to great effect adding realism to the treatments of the day mentioned in the book, and giving the reader good insight into the psyche of the various characters.

RRP $30.00
Published and distributed by Penguin Group under the Simon and Schuster title
 

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