Hospital

by Sanya Rushdi, Arunava Sinha (Translator)

A strong and courageous novel that deftly tackles psychosis.In Melbourne, Australia, a woman in her late thirties is diagnosed with her third episode of psychosis, amounting to schizophrenia. What follows is a frenzied journey from home to a community house to a hospital and out again. Sanya, the protagonist, finds herself questioning the diagnosis of her sanity or insanity, as determined and defined by a medical model which seems less than convincing to her. Having studied psychology herself, she wonders whether, even if the diagnosis is correct to some extent, the treatment should be different. Sanya tells her story in a deceptively calm, first-person voice, using conversations as the primary narrative mode, as she ponders if and when the next psychotic episode will materialize.Based on real-life events and originally written in Bengali, Hospital is a daring first novel that unflinchingly depicts the precarity of a woman living with psychosis and her struggles with the definition of sanity in our society.

Genres: Fiction, Mental Health, Contemporary, Australia, Translated Fiction, Audiobook, Psychology

128 pages, Paperback

First published June 5, 2023

Reviews

[Nat K · Rating 4 out of 5]

***Longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize***

***04.April.2024 Shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize***

As the title suggests, this is one woman's story about her stay in hospital after a(nother) episode of psychosis.

Moving between the family home, a share/community house and a psychiatric ward, this novella has moments of utter beauty and others of chilling reality.

At times it's difficult to know how many of the observations are true, as our narrator may be a somewhat unreliable one. She wonders why she is in hospital and what she's being treated for, as she doesn't feel unwell and simply wants to return to the university library to continue her studies.

It's a heart rending story of how complex our minds are, and how tenuous our grip of reality may be. Looking around the ward through her eyes at the other patients, the quick friendships that strike up, and her interpretations of gestures and weather as to how events will turn out...

"The afternoon has given way to evening, evening to dusk, dusk to night. My eyes have been fixed outside the window all the time. There have been storms throughout, the state of my mind matching the state of nature to provide some sort of consolidation."

I at times found it difficult to understand how as a patient she was treated with some derision. I don't know if this is the word I'm looking for, but it was frightening how someone who is obviously coming from a place of fear wasn't given an option to discuss her treatment on arrival. Perhaps circumstances didn't allow it, but I found that to be very confronting.

Set in Melbourne, this is translated from Bengali by Indian translator Arunava Sinha.

Sanya Rushdi talks about writing this book to share her experiences and to try to remove the stigma for people suffering mental health episodes here:
https://stella.org.au/sanya-rushdi-ho...

This is unique and quite unlike anything I've read before. A very interesting choice for the Stella Prize longlist. I hope it makes the shortlist and reaches a wider audience.

Book 5 of my Stella Prize 2024 reading longlist.

[Vivek Tejuja · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "Hospital" with trepidation. I was apprehensive about getting triggered regarding my mental health issues, but if anything, I am glad I read it, because while it may seem that the book is about descent into madness and maybe to some extent it is, but it is also about so much more. It is primarily about language, and Arunava Sinha being the translator par excellence that he is uses it sometimes playfully, sometimes using melancholia, mostly matter-of-fact, and sometimes as a means of self-exploration for the protagonist Sanya (yeah, it is a metanovel inspired by real-life events). He is in absolute sync with the mindset of the writer, the protagonist, and more than anything else with where the story unfolds - that in a hospital in Australia.

The story is told from the perspective of a patient - all in first person - of Sanya's feelings, of what is unravelling slowly yet surely, of what is hidden behind a wall of caution when it comes to giving away too much, of safeguarding oneself and seeing the world as an enemy by and large, Hospital asks big questions: What is sanity? Who is sane? What is the societal parameter of someone being sane or not? And all of this is questionable a little more than ever, because you as a reader are made aware from the first page that the narration could be unreliable, but you cannot help it - you have to read it, you have to know how is it going to be for Sanya - what her life is going to turn out like - how her world is constantly shifting and changing.

Arunava's translations are always a delight to read. He gets into the skin of language, and what emerges is something extraordinarily unique only to what he has translated from the source. Hospital cuts like a knife and makes you so uncomfortable as a reader, which I think should be one of the objectives of literature - to shake the reader, to get us to spaces that are suffocating, and make us see things - whether we trust them or not, rely on them or not, that is secondary - in fact should not even be considered, given how the story propels us further.

Hospital by Sanya Rushdi quietly takes you by the hand, and then leaves you to your own device in the mind of the protagonist. We live with her, and see the world through her, the places we know, and the places we are made aware of. The titular place then becomes most ordinary, turns extraordinary, lets us in, and makes us see all the failings and sometimes joy of living.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly (thought) provoking novel. I put novel in question marks, not because it isn't good, but because it is one of several of 2024's Stella nominees that blur the space between fiction and memoir, with Hospital coming down on the fiction side of this wafer-thin divide.
It is worth noting that Hospital is so heart-clenchingly real in its portrayal of mental illness and the current state of inpatient treatment that it might need to be approached with caution by anyone likely to be triggered. Rushdi's narrator, Sanya, documents through her diary how her world tips slightly on its axis, revealing patterns that cannot but seem sinister and increasingly worrisome encounters with others. It is easy for the reader to ache for Sanya's family, trying to care for her and unable to reach her, but it is Sanya's sense of isolation that we directly see.
The professionals she deals with - several CATT (Crisis Assessment and Treatment Teams) staff, a paramedic, nurses, and a psychiatrist - are mostly caring, warm and respectful. This accords with my own experience. However, they are all running through a set of questions designed to triage crisis states, aiming to identify risks, prescribe medication, and/or determine whether custodial arrangements are necessary (noting there are always several possible occupants for each bed in such a facility, where demand vastly outstrips need). What Sanya wants is time to talk, people to listen, and a chance to recover by unspooling her own thoughts and logic. No one in this world is there to listen properly, and she circles around in her own thoughts. Her diary also works to help her understand her own situation, and much of the book is about language. But, perhaps because I have recently been reading about Japan's Bethal facility for people with delusions, and partly because of my own experiences with navigating mental health services, it was the aspects dealing with mental health treatment that engaged me.
The facility she ends up in is on the better end of Australia's mental health system. Low security, private rooms, regular staff. For those unfamiliar, this is a world away from what is available to public patients. Aspects of this are unnerving and familiar if you have spent time in similar facilities - the outdoor spaces colonised for smoking, the camaraderie of the patients (which often constitutes most of the healing, these real social connections), the cafeteria food, the odd assortment of thrown together activities, the hierarchy of freedoms. Other aspects are uncomfortably presented: the close living makes intense emotional outbursts hard to cope with, and the response is usually to medicate to "stabilise mood" with little distinction between what is socially necessary vs what is therapeutically needed. Appointments with psychiatrists are infrequent, short, and largely notify patients of medication changes decided already by reviewing the notes of the nurses. It is an impossible situation for Sanya to articulate her experiences or discuss her treatment. There is a constant, yawning gap between the world as Sanya is experiencing it, and how those in charge of Sanya are judging her situation.
While it may be a triggering read, it is not a difficult one. Rushdi writes with compassion for all those who appear in the pages. This is a book as bridge to understanding, and I hope might contribute to a better approach.

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short novel focuses on Sanya and her experience wirth psychosis, Schizophrenia, and how she lives at home with her family, then in a community house, a hospital and out again. The writing style is incredibly sparse, removed and urgent, making it very addictive and also creating a feeling of fractured experience - perhaps mimicing psychosis through language?

Explores ideas of identity, perception, safety, agency, trust, fear, exploitation and care and walks the line between what a mentally ill person can consent to and what they can’t and the extent to which their perception of this should be considered and to which extent “experts” should make decisions for them to help them get better.

“The mind cannot be defined. Defining it would turn it a know it into an object.”


Set in Melbourne, Australia. Translated from Bengali.


Example of prose:

“There's a shooting pain in my head. I don't know what time it is or how long I've been sitting this way. My entire body feels numb. My eyes are fixed on the darkness outside the large window. I could see three trees as long as there was daylight, the leaves they had shed were gathering in ones and twos at their feet. Falling off the branches to which they had clung lovingly, they added to the pile of leaves like children gathering at an orphanage. Then a gust of wind scattered them; whatever refuge they had from one another was lost. Now all they had was themselves, along with the wind and its whims.”

[Pearl · Rating 4 out of 5]

reading this while being sick myself was emotionally taxing, yet so worth it. one of the best books i have read on mental illnesses, with a nice depiction of psychosis without glossing over the details much. the fact that it is based on rushdi's own experiences makes it a heart wrenching read. loved this book.

[Hayley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a slow but immersive read for me. I have never read a novel from the perspective of someone experiencing psychosis before. A very interesting and unusual concept for a novel. This novel has its own particular style of prose, which I found to be effective in presenting the protagonist’s lived experience

The Stella Prize longlist brought this book to my attention, which I appreciate, as I doubt I would have otherwise discovered it. This is definitely a diverse and interesting read.

[endrju · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm torn. On the one hand, I really don't like flat prose. It simply doesn't get my literary juices going. On the other hand, flat prose leads to the (perhaps) intentional despectacularization of the mad (and I use the term here in the activist sense). There is a lot of philosophical, theoretical and artistic work that draws on the experience of madness, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia being perhaps the crown achievement of that line, but all of them in one or another way use the mad as a concept, metaphor or whatever to point to something else, creating a whole theater of the experience along the way where madness assumes all sorts of (discursive) roles. Sanya Rushdi's Hospital simply tells, and it must be appreciated for that. I recommend Wouter Kusters' A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking to be read before/along/after the novel. We need more mad people speaking for themselves and about themselves.

[Susan A]

This book, especially Chapter 12, had me questioning the medical model of mental health in hospitals and how it’s obviously not a one size fits all. Would be keen to re-read this post my psych rotation. I think I read it too quickly and this book requires time because it’s written during an episode of psychosis, so there are moments where it is confusing.

[Annie Gilholm rowland · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 ⭐️’s for the living experience voice that just must be heard/amplified/lifted.

[Sophy H · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmmm, a tough one to review.

Honestly I can see what Sanya Rushdi was trying to do here but I don't know whether translation was the issue or the construction of the story but this just didn't work. Don't get me wrong, we are briefly shown the effects and consequences of living with psychosis (the disordered thinking, the paranoia, the lapses in time management, the lack of judgement), but there are pages and pages of banal dialogue to trawl through as the protagonist moves from home to shared house to public domain and back. During these "dialogue" pages I began speed reading (which is obviously bad for a book that is only 160 odd pages long) and honestly, skip a few pages and nothing of the story is missed.

I had high hopes for this one as it was recommended on a couple of book websites and the reviews seemed to offer nothing but praise. It was very disappointing.

In all honesty, if I was looking for a fictional book on the subject of schizophrenia or psychosis, I would choose The Octopus Man as this to me portrays schizophrenia and psychosis in a far more cogent manner than Rushdi's offering. For non fiction on the same subject I would suggest The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays or Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing, both are equally superb.

Sorry Sanya but this just didn't cut the mustard for me. 2 stars at most.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Novels about mental illness are not a big attraction to me, but the mystery element of this, combined with its short length appealed to me enough to take it on.

The protagonist, who shares her first name with the author, is in her thirties and undertaking medical treatment for psychosis. Sanya’s journey is a spiral of care homes and hospitalisation where the various twists and turns she encounters open up a different set of problems. It seems a conventional approach to her treatment is not the solution. Just before the third episode of her psychosis, Sanya questions the very science behind it all, which, she thinks, is restricted and lacks innovation in its methods and is in desperate need of finding new ways to engage patients.

It was a surprisingly engrossing read.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up from the Torquay Library because I saw the author lived in Melbourne. Such a striking way to write about mental illness and language. I felt like I was right there with the narrator through her psychosis. The way she expressed discordance between her perceptions and her family’s reactions was so insightful about the condition while also managing to feel surreal and poetic.

[Natalie J · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

This book is such a surreal listen- was an interesting insight but was pretty hard to follow at times (which is part of the point I guess)

[Shrirang Kale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read - .. I think everyone doubts the subjective reality around them and somehow tries to adjust as per their surroundings. 

.. Reminds khatarnaaak philosophy from the likes of Adi Shankara, Yogachaar V, Berkley, Hume ...

[Mary Mckennalong · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this short book after looking at the Stella prize short list and I was interested in the blurb. I don’t know what to make of it. For me, as an English language reader , it’s always hard to know if the writing and dialogue is deliberately stilted and stiff or if it’s the unavoidable result of it being a translation. I’m amazed by the author’s bravery writing this book, to write with such vulnerability is something special. I can’t say I enjoyed it because in my mostly conventional mind, I couldn’t relate to her descriptions or logic at times and there was no story line really, just episodes. But it achieved what I think is one of its purposes, we need to be braver about accepting people outside the psychological norm and living alongside them. What are our boundaries of conventional thinking, who determines them? Drug companies? What visions are we missing out on from those with the language to express their inner life. Her friend Tanvir, through simply listening, helped her order some of her experiences. I’ll take away the feeling of this book rather than the story. Unsettling, challenging read.

[Gavan · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5* rounded up to 2*. An interesting story but very poorly told. Not sure whether to blame the translator or original author - the writing style was incredibly basic. And a good editor could have made this so much better as the arc dragged on with repetition of events (many of which could have been deleted without any real impact). Not sure how this could have been on any literary short list.

[Merceiam · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF Oct 2024
A Stella prize contender - really?

[CJ]

i think this year in reading has been me coming to see books less as complete, finished products and statements and ideas and more like how i’ve come to see visual art—something in process, something emergent, where books i love the most aren’t about constructedness and structure but rather books that point to the limitations of what they try to say, that are little effortfully made vessels for something moving and quick and ungraspable. things that aren’t internally bound, circular, but that reach outward and beyond, that feel as iterative as any era or any day of life: trying, getting tired, resting, trying again.

Hospital has all of that—it’s not a piece of writing that feels particularly interested or bound up in self-definition, in hewing to memoir or fiction; it’s earnest and honest and evocative but not in a way that capitulates to shallow platitudes about universality and the easiness of representation. it’s difficult to read; disorienting, disjointed, and yet spoken with a simple clarity of a mind articulating its experience of being a body in the world, where the limits between the imagined, the objective, the felt and remembered, don’t matter as much, where the strictures and carceral evaluations of health, sanity, and normalcy fall away. what instead takes priority is one’s ability to understand, grasp, and articulate what one is going through; the space, patience, and trust to allow one to move through experience and life as one can, must, and wants to; the boundary where we can ask how better to treat each other, better understand each other (through an understanding, again, always, that we are each different and fundamentally unknowable to each other), how a better world for all looks like.

there are portions of the book where sanya begins to narrate, earnestly and directly, what she wishes for in this world, but it never felt like a constructed, didactic set of instructions to me, moreso an attempt to express what was impossible and hurtful about the world of the hospital, of the community house, of medicine and family, and an attempt to locate, within all of it, the agency of one suffering and hurting and healing to find the path that feels best for them, to figure out their relationship to mind and body and world on their terms, in their language.

i’m really curious how arunava sinha approached translating a book whose central question is the difficulty and complexity of language for someone who experiences the world so differently from what is perceived as normal and neurotypical. it read beautifully and i was really reminded, constantly, of virginia woolf: not in a reductive comparative way, but that woolf’s lyrical rendering of the movements between the world and the internal self, her fixation on language and its slipperiness, felt to be in conversation and in harmony with rushdi’s own questions and thoughts, in ways that felt moving and lovely and made me think about how to revisit and rethink these other works that i’ve loved so much, and have thought so much about.

there was a moment when reading this book transported me to a part of my mind that feels so untethered and apart from the world outside and i walked around delirious and disoriented, temporarily unable to find my way back to the part of me that knew how to move through the world, how to perceive things and respond to them and talk to people and make decisions. the world felt strange and alien and my vision felt small and limited, like a small cone of light in an immense, indecipherable darkness. i don’t inhabit this state of mind often, but i was reminded that it is there, beneath the scaffolding that enables me to move with ease through the world; it did not feel foreign but rather like a part of myself that was old—had been there since i was young—and simply had found guide rails, paths. without laying claim to other experiences and other states of being, i think we would all benefit from remembering that we each once found the world foreign and unknowable; that the world always fundamentally remains that way, even though we are socialised into a stable relationship with it through a variety of languages and systems, that we would do better to remember and hold onto that part that is hard and difficult and illuminating all at once.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting read with a unique structure. At first I didn’t like the structure and found it childish (similar to what my students write and I tell them to edit!), but as the book went on, I think it worked to develop an authentic voice for the narrator. The insight into psychosis and mental illness was fascinating and it was hard to determine between fact and fiction, just like the life of people experiencing these diseases. Definitely worth reading and it is a book I can see myself re-reading.

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was well deserved to reach the short-list for multiple literary awards. Based on real-life events, this short novel follows Sanya (Sunny) as she experiences her third episode of psychosis and is hospitalised for a time.

Masterfully written, it is hard to follow the timeline, which I imagine is incredibly reflective for some in their experience of severe mental health issues.

Knowing it was translated from Bengali, I don't feel anything was lost in the English version. In fact, I found this novel moving and insightful.

[Claudia Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

a really quick read, it was super engaging and i found myself unable to put it down.

i really enjoyed the way the author approached discussions of mental health issues, the sparse, more rational type of language used worked really well in my opinion. i prefer this approach rather than the common tendency of others to use overly vague and flowery language!

i also loved the way dialogue was presented in this book, as it helped to see things from sanya's perspective. i'm also very biased to love this given that it's set in melbourne lol.

[Ceana Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

extremely delayed start time 2025 …yikes
picked this book up for the cute cover art of my copy, finished it because it was v simple to read with no over articulation

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, highly recommend if you know of or work with people who experience psychosis

[Thomas Feng · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book where the unflinching experience of psychosis and the medical model of treating people is laid bare.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

My kingdom for a mental health book that doesn’t demonise medication.

[Krys · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not usually a fan of minimalistic prose, but in this case, the protagonist's matter-of-fact articulation of her mental health treatments within the Australian healthcare system exposed her profound isolation. It's quietly heartbreaking because it reads as if her family and the healthcare staff do genuinely care about her, and yet, because the healthcare system is designed to cater to patients en masse, it necessitates a degree of one-size-fits-all rigidity that ignores each patient's desperate need for individualised care. All Sanya really wants is to be listened to; instead she is repeatedly told that she is unwell and her mood requires stabilising.

[Natasha (jouljet) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but complex read into the mind and thoughts of a young woman experiencing psychosis.

Her meandering thoughts, the significant connections in her mind, the spiralling. It's quite an unnerving, uncomfortable read, often wondering what is real, imaged, an over-thinking manifestation, or a misunderstanding. A brave and raw insight into the jumbled and disturbed mind.

One of only a handful of translated books to be listed for the Stella Prize.

[James Whitmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Can people hear me think? Let them,” the narrator of this short-but-potent novel proclaims. She shares her name, Sanya, with her author, a hint of the complex dance of words and meanings that she plumbs.

We are cast adrift at the beginning, entering Sanya’s world as she is entering a psychotic episode. “This sudden fear of brown,” she writes, “I was surrounded by brown things”. First she goes into a community house for care. When she leaves, she goes to the university library to continue her research, a PhD in psychology into language and childhood development, which she paused when she had her first episode of psychosis many years earlier. But apparently she’s not meant to be there, because a security guard calls paramedics and she’s taken to hospital. Later, when she checks herself out, she is returned there under the duress of the cops. The bulk of the story follows Sanya as she navigates this period on a psychiatric ward. Read more on my blog

[Eugene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simple prose format helps to convey the intra-psychosis logic of the narrator. The simple prose in combination with little delineation of time elapsing in the hospital makes the story feel dream-like. At times I was unable to discern whether this was done on purpose or not.

This seemed the strongest in Sanya's random fleeting intimacies in the hospital that didn't feel real. These accounts specifically reminded me of the Adventure Time episode 'all the little people'.

I liked reading this because I am interested in accounts of schizophrenia. However, without this interest, the novel would feel a little bit too simple to retain my interest.

[Yonit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting pick for Women in Translation month as it is by an Australian author but translated from Bengali. Written in a very simple style, the book takes us right into the head of a person with psychosis and offers valuable insight into what its like for a person seeking treatment.