review
‘Spook Fish’ is a slim volume of literary fiction interweaving the lives of patients and staff members at a psychiatric hospital in north Germany between the 1920s and the present day. Svealena Kutschke’s enthralling narrative has echoes of Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and Ali Smith’s short stories about Olive Fraser in Shire.
The novel opens in the 1990s as the student Laura Schmidt is admitted as an in-patient at the Jannsen psychiatric clinic, feeling increasingly alienated from herself and those around her. She is particularly drawn to two elderly women at the clinic, Rehfeld and Noll, a couple who spend their time writing and reading.
Laura continues to visit Rehfeld at the clinic after being discharged. But it is not until after Rehfeld’s death that she learns her tragic story. Once a promising writer, Rehfeld had spent most of her adult life in the psychiatric hospital, having been committed in the 1930s or ‘40s by her ex-husband, the doctor Hargen Fellner. The schizophrenia he claimed to have diagnosed – seemingly prompted by her being attracted to women and not wanting children with him – had in fact been caused by the medication he prescribed for her ‘condition’. Her medication was only reviewed years later during the 1980s by her stepson, Thorsten Fellner, now a doctor at the clinic himself. Rehfeld regained her sense of self but remained at the clinic, unable to face a life outside of it.
Laura, now a professional graphic designer, becomes obsessed with Rehfeld’s life and writing and sets out to research and illustrate them. She and the reader learn about the chequered history of the clinic that had seemed so progressive in the 1920s: the abuse of patients long into the second half of the twentieth century, as well as the many patients sent to the gas chambers – an atrocity uncovered by students during the 1980s.
All of this is interwoven with the stories of various other characters, among them Thorsten Fellner, who is unable to come to terms with his parents’ collaboration with the Nazis, and Maren Holm, the daughter of one of the clinic nurses, who was in part brought up by Rehfeld and Noll and whose stepdaughter Sophia later ends up in the hospital with bulimia. The novel finishes with Laura giving two copies of her book, which she has finally finished, to the hospital.
‘Spook Fish’ is an evocative and engaging book, whose characters and themes remain with the reader long after they have finished reading.
Find out more: https://www.schoeffling.de/produkt/gespensterfische/
All recommendations from Spring 2025