Mars

✍ Scribed by Fritz Zorn

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Year: 1982
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 139 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

An amazing book— as complete, as moving, as revealing as one of Freud’s case histories—Mars has already become an intellectual event in Europe, not only for its devastating power, but also for its sear­ ing and controversial vision of what cancer can be in human life: a symptom of psychic disorder.
Fritz “Zorn” was a young Swiss German who was born in Zurich and died there at the age of thirty-two, in 1976. This astonishing document, written in his last months, is his unsparing account of himself and the world that made him. It is an impassioned indictment of every­
thing that his rigid middle-class society had codified into a “good upbringing,” a horrendously airtight world of puritan- ism and privilege that destroyed his childhood and made of him an adult so cut off from all real feeling and emotion that existence was a zero. It is a book that shocks and disturbs us as it reveals how for the first time, already in his thirties, Zorn was brought to recognize the emotionless stupor that he had mistaken for living, as he broke into the realms of feeling—how it was only the growth of the cancer in his body that began to move him
toward life, how it was only the imminence of his own death that gave him, at last, the surging energy to propel himself out of his paralyzing, neurotic depression...