She's Not Herself.('Atmospheric Disturbances')(Book review)

In 1835, Georg Buchner, a young sometime medical student, began to write "Lenz," a story that inhabits the schizophrenic breakdown of the eighteenth-century poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. It opens simply, like a Romantic stroll: "The 20th, Lenz walked through the mountains." There is snow on the peaks and fog in the valleys. And then, seven sentences into it, something strange happens: "He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head." Like Lenz, we have suddenly entered an upside-down world. Lenz imagines that someone is communicating to him in hieroglyphics; he runs around manically, in the middle of the night; he thinks himself ...