A Young Girl Dressed Deeply in Black.

‘The finding of the missing girl was due to disciplined legwork,’ the Police Commander leading the investigation into the unnamed teenager’s disappearance explained last night. 

     The first bulletin released a description of the runaway, he went on, which stated, ‘Jane Doe, age fourteen years, eyes blue, blonde hair, height 5 ft 2 ins, slim build, scar on left elbow, quiet-spoken, and possibly amnesiac.’

     

     Acting on operational intelligence, however, after the grandmother of the runaway revealed certain details of the traumatic effects of a recent bereavement on the girl, a city-wide all-points police broadcast to patrolmen swiftly resulted in the subject of the search being traced.

     Since the tragic death of her parents, both killed instantly in a fatal multi-vehicle expressway crash in November last year, the teenager it was understood had become profoundly affected by her loss and she had vanished from her home. Investigators believed that the girl, due to profound grief, had lost her memory and according to latest reports this appears to be the case.

     The fact that the girl wore mourning attire of a distinct character meant that a large number of witnesses came forward who remembered vividly her last movements, as it unusual to see a young girl dressed deeply in black, and her whereabouts were soon known to close the case without undue delay, or distress to the missing teenager.

Anti-Chekhovian Sentiments.

‘Why do you always wear black?’
    This question recalled Masha’s famous opening line in the first act of The Seagull, Jane Doe later reminded a policewoman (she had studied Chekhov’s play at junior high school). 

      ‘But don’t think for all that I am in mourning for my own life,’ she insisted. ‘Let there be no doubt it is the lives of my devoted parents I devoutly mourn.’  In detention the grieving girl had also stated, ‘I can’t be treated as if I were any normal girl of fourteen.’

      Curiously, this run-in with a police squad, so early in Jane Doe’s formative years, would come to be seen as a significant precursor to a later encounter with NYPD patrolmen on the occasion of her sensational disappearance, age twenty-four, in the case once popularly known as the Nuke-Shelter Spy Nest Affair.

      In 2008, when a notice heralding the authorised account of the notorious case first appeared (Thought Police, see page 414 of Catherine Eisner’s Sister Morphine published by Salt), the announcement concluded that ‘. . . when, even the Press have so far failed to uncover clues to solve the mystery of her disappearance, tantalisingly, the publication of a full account of her astonishing story must be delayed until the next edition of this work [i.e. A Room to the End of Fall Salt 2014].’ 

      This earlier commentary observed that, frustratingly, the occasion of Jane Doe’s disappearance, corroborated by a number of witnesses, had been more closely documented and reported more faithfully than the bizarre circumstances of her discovery. 

The Second Disappearance . . . Burrowing Under the Floor . . .

In Thought Police there is a sketch of the scene outside Jane Doe’s city apartment house, the day before her disappearance, that gave rise to the narrative’s title. A police patrol car halts beside her as she stands immobile in an unseasonable flurry of snow, dressed in a thin housecoat, staring fixedly at a drain cover where the snowfall had melted in a perfect dish-shaped concavity.

      The cops are friendly and polite. 

      They had merely put to her one question: ‘Something on your mind, maybe?’  

      ‘No. It’s nothing,’ she answers dryly with a false smile. ‘Unless, perhaps, you’re a deputation from the Thought Police.’

      A day later she vanishes without a trace to reemerge half a decade later.

      In Thought Police in 2008 there are quoted a few key passages from her diary into which she had copied extracts from Chekhov’s sinister cautionary tale, The Bet, whose unnamed young hero has himself incarcerated voluntarily for fifteen years in a well-stocked library – in solitary confinement – to win a bet of two million roubles wagered by a banker.

      ‘The prisoner (writes Jane Doe), amazingly, in four years, reads over six hundred volumes and when, after fifteen years of confinement in which he imbibes the world’s classics, he emerges into daylight, his appearance is almost spectral. His face is yellow, his cheeks are hollow, his hair is streaked with silver, and no one can believe that he is only forty! He is a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones and long matted curls like . . . like, well, like my own, if I’m honest. But what does the prisoner declare upon his release that I would not myself assert were I to meet that hateful unconscionable banker!?

      ‘ “Your books have given me wisdom. All man’s unresting thought from the ages is compressed into the small compass of my brain. I know that I am wiser than all of you. And I despise your books, as I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage . . . as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor . . .” ’

Anomie and related neurotica. 

‘Jane Doe’ evidently empathised strongly with Chekhov’s disillusioned bookish captive, but she herself denied at the time a Freudo-Marxist view of alienation to explain her own anomie and other related neurotica. 

     Despite admitting to severe psychological adjustment problems, she claimed her sense of dislocation from a once familiar world was due, essentially, to the extreme mistrust and suspicion with which she regarded her literary agent, Sherman Seymour Dane. Specifically, she falsely accused Dane of ghostwriting the major portion of her novel, An Auroral Stain, which was published to mixed reviews during her enforced absence. ‘For Seymour, it was more than a case of corpus delicti when I disappeared,’ Jane Doe alleged, ‘it was a case of a missing opus whose inconvenient absence was remedied when he presumed to “complete” the work without my authorisation.’ 

     That she was wholly misguided in this belief the narrative A Room to the End of Fall now happily remedies. See her unredacted text in A Bad Case, 2014. Please note: To allay suspicions of editorial tampering (spelling, punctuation, usage, etc.), which for very sound reasons this American narrator maintains, her native US orthography in this account remains unchanged.

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

The Irreconcilable Sententiousness of Libertine Old Masters . . .

In the collected works of Anton Chekhov the short story, Imeniny (The Name-Day Party), is often singled out as a remarkably faithful portrait of a pregnant woman: the highs and lows of a loyal, sensitive wife betrayed by a heedless, self-regarding husband.

However . . . never mind that this tale has been described by Chekhovian scholars as a most profound ‘tour de force’ for his account of the psychopathology of the late stages of the third trimester – the discomfort, the hypersensitivity, the gravid leadenness – we should first remember that Dr. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a male clinician and even his talent for empathetic vraisemblance had obvious boundaries.

On the other hand, his profound empathy cannot be doubted in the shadow-twin of this story, Pripadok (An Attack of Nerves), both published in the same year . . . significantly, Year Zero, as defined by Nietzsche’s Umwerthung aller Werthe (Revaluation of All Values) of 1888.

Compare the two. It’s a striking contrast, as though one story has prompted the other. In the former, the fallow connubial bed cannot excuse the stirrings of infidelity in a swaggering indifferent husband; in the latter, a virginal young law student, Vassilyev, reluctantly on a night’s carouse with two comrades intent on inducting him into the ‘pleasures’ of brothels, experiences a moral crisis, and asks: ‘Is the debauching of prostitutes not a crime? Is it not as great an evil as slave-owning, rape or murder?’  

With strict adherence to his anti-pedagogic method, Chekhov follows his own advice and asked the questions without seeking answers to them: his stories thence characteristically become exercises in propositional logic strewn with premises but deficient of any conclusions.

In my novel, D-r Tchékhov, Detektiv, I seek mischievously  to correct this tendency towards moral ambivalence with the syllogistic reasoning of my conflicted antihero sometimes pursued to unwelcome logical proofs that appear axiomatic, see
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/d-r-tchekhov-detektiv-long-lost-novel.html

Tchékhov paid the ferriage for the rivercrossing and the survey party embarked, stumbling in the unearthly stealing polar dusk.
   ‘There is no hurry,’ Anton remarked breezily, as the ferryman took his arm. ‘Charon waits for all!’
   A putrid smell arose as the waves sucked at the stern ; for the river had been turbulent in recent months and, as it flowed along, like a ferocious animal, it gnawed and ate away the fast-ice clutching the banks.
   Small chunks of ice rapped on the hull. Shuddering as the northerly shook him by the throat, Anton clenched the forward-rail and searched the midafternoon murk for a closing shore.
   (‘Finita la commedia!’ his heart cried, ‘and end this burdensome daylong travail.’)
   A wreath entwined with withered leaves of laurel was sucked by on the swirling current. A melancholy syllogism occurred to him :

Man is composed of 60% water ;

water strives to seek its own level ; 

60% of a man’s soul desires to plunge at once over the side of a ferry boat.

Also, for more probings into this field of enquiry, see the contradictions hitherto unremarked in the ‘classic prose’ of an eminent English syllogistic rationalist at this link:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012_04_01_archive.html

Do As I Say. Not As I Do.

So lately I’ve found Chekhov’s abbreviated propositional method has grown tiresome and his ‘classic prose’ is now seen, to my jaundiced eye, to express a sort of inverted sententiousness.

I invite you, therefore, to examine closely the following passage from Chekhov’s An Attack of Nerves and the additional quotations that follow; with the challenge that you, too, reader-of-literary-old-masters, should consider a revaluation of values.

[Vassilyev thought] ‘. . . What is the use of their humanity, their medicine, their painting? The science, art, and lofty sentiments of these soul-destroyers remind me of [the two] brigands [who] murdered a beggar in a forest . . . After murdering a man, they came out of the forest in the firm conviction that they were [still observing a holy fast]. In the same way [these student comrades], after buying women, go their way imagining that they are artists and men of science. . . .’ 
    ‘Listen!’ he said sharply and angrily. ‘Why do you come here? Is it possible you don't understand how horrible it is? Your medical books tell you that every one of these women dies prematurely of consumption or something; art tells you that morally they are dead even earlier. Every one of them dies because she has in her time to entertain five hundred men on an average, let us say. Each one of them is killed by five hundred men. You are among those five hundred! If each of you in the course of your lives visits [brothels] two hundred and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of you! Can’t you understand that? Isn't it horrible to murder, two of you, three of you, five of you, a foolish, hungry woman! . . .’ 

Two years earlier (1886), one should recall, Chekhov wrote a cautionary letter to his brother Nikolai reprimanding him for his pleasure-seeking in Moscow’s lower depths, counselling him to become a more cultured person since he had within him the talent to be at ease in the company of ‘educated people . . . Talent has brought you into such a circle, you belong to it, but … you are drawn away from it, and you vacillate between cultured people and [drinking cronies] . . .’ Anton implores Nikolai to ‘smash the vodka bottle . . .’

Anton continues to moralise with self-referential gravity on the duties of a cultured artist.

They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct . . . What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow … They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood . . .  For they want mens sana in corpore sano.

Mens sana in corpore sano? Did Anton Chekhov truly believe that for a supreme artist the ennobling of the sexual instinct was an attainable ideal? Certainly, the innumerable amatory adventures – including his own – of so many old masters do not bear close scrutiny in support of his proposition.

Chekhov’s Formula for Extrapolating the Mortality of Fallen Women. 

According to a Los Angeles Times reviewer, Georges Simenon created a scandale à la mode by telling two different interviewers that from age 13 he had slept with 10,000 women, of whom 8,000 were prostitutes. By applying Chekhov’s equation, we can calculate that Simenon, the master of homicidal psychopathology, had himself, before his death aged 86, killed at least sixteen women.


Chekhov expresses his computation thus: ‘If each of you in the course of your lives visits [brothels] two hundred and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of you!’

On this sensitive matter, a Chekhov aficionado states in the London Guardian daily of 1 March 2013: 

It starts in 1873, when the teenage Chekhov visited a brothel in his home town of Taganrog and continues until 1898 when his relationship with the actress Olga Knipper began . . . The picture that emerges is of a man who, over the course of a couple of decades, enjoyed at least two-dozen love affairs of varying intensity – some extremely passionate, some casual, some lasting many years, and some that were clearly going on simultaneously – and who, it’s also clear from his letters, continued to be a regular visitor to brothels in Russia and elsewhere in Europe.

I am reminded of this confraternity of literary men consecrated to unswerving faith in the undemanding tenets of their irreconcilable sententiousness when I attended a wedding recently and heard from the altar, at the bridegroom’s request, a recitation of Siempre (‘Always’) by Pablo Neruda.

I am not jealous

of what came before me.

Come with a man

on your shoulders,

come with a hundred men in your hair,

come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,

This boast invites a challenge, coming as it does from an arch philanderer and from a husband who in pursuit of other women abandoned an inconvenient wife and their ailing infant daughter, a choice of moral worth little different from that of Rainer Maria Rilke whose daughter was similarly abandoned before the age of one.

More than this, these proponents of doublethink, propagating their creed of irreconcilable sententiousness, appear to give little thought to the consequences of their libertinage.

As it is, 125 years have elapsed since Chekhov first posited his theory of venereal disease in terms of quantifiable culpability, and medical research into its incidence and prevention has advanced apace. Nevertheless, screening in Great Britain in the last decade suggests that as many as one in 10 sexually active men has the sexually transmitted infection Chlamydia without knowing it. The figures are in line with similar studies of sexually active young women, which indicate that one in 10 also has the infection without knowing it. 

‘Man Wants Woman! Every Man Wants a Woman! So Natural!’

Possibly One in 10 has the infection without knowing it. It would follow, then, that with the level of promiscuity that Neruda embraces in his magnanimous welcome to the 1,100 lovers of the Love-of-His-Life (‘Bring them all to where I am waiting for you . . .’) over one hundred of them, and undoubtedly his inamorata, will be infected.

Cervical smear showing Chlamydia trachomatis in the vacuoles. 

Mens sana in corpore sano? To return to first principles and the irreconcilability of sententiousness attendant on the licentiousness of old masters. Question. Were the nostrums Dr Chekhov prescribed for the world swallowed merely by his adulatory readers and never dispensed to the great man himself?

Even today, controversy rages in Yalta concerning rumours of Chekhov’s predilection for prostitutes. 

In the November 22 1997 edition of the London Guardian can be read an account of an argument between a Yalta sanatorium doctor, Dr Yuri Zinenko and his wife, Valentina, a neurosurgeon: ‘Nyet! Nyet! Prostitut! Of course he visited prostitutes! Man wants Woman! Every man wants a woman! So natural!’

From a medical standpoint, the surgeon’s husband believed that Dr Chekhov’s degeneration through tuberculosis would not have stopped him: ‘His consumption was the most severe kind, but this can just make a tubercular patient more active.’

A cordon sanitaire, therefore, is better drawn over this sensitive matter, when even medico-compatriots can’t agree, aside from their separate views, as husband or wife. 

Come with a hundred men in your hair,
Come with a thousand men between your breasts.
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A Moral Undrawn.

No moral can be drawn from these musings, obviously. That would be most un-Chekhovian. 

And yet . . . many devotees have commented that in his care for others Chekhov neglected to cure himself, a point made in a sly authorial backhanded observation by a character in Nabokov’s novel The Gift: ‘I wouldn’t have been treated by Dr Chekhov for anything in the world.’

Prostitutes soliciting in Moscow in the late Twentieth Century.

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Thought Police: A Message from the Secret Cellars of the Missing.

It is with a sense of profound relief that, after a hiatus of several decades due to irresolvable public disclosure constraints, I can report that my contribution to that sub-genre of confessional writings termed Lazarine Literature* – otherwise known as prison literature – is now complete.  Its title?  A Room to the End of Fall. 

 

A Room to the End of Fall.

When my notice heralding the narrative of novelist Theresa Ollivante’s disappearance was first published (see the chapter, Thought Police, page 414 of Sister Morphine published by Salt in 2008) ...
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html 
... the announcement concluded that:

‘... when, even the Press have so far failed to uncover clues to solve the mystery of her disappearance, tantalisingly, the publication of a full account of her astonishing story must be delayed until the next edition of this work [Sister Morphine].’
            This earlier commentary observed that, frustratingly, the occasion of Theresa’s disappearance, corroborated by a number of witnesses, had been more closely documented and reported more faithfully than the bizarre circumstances of her discovery.
            In Thought Police there is a sketch of the scene outside Theresa’s city apartment house, the day before her disappearance, that gave rise to the narrative’s working title. A police patrol car halts beside her as she stands immobile in an unseasonal flurry of snow, dressed in a thin housecoat, staring fixedly at a drain cover where the snowfall had melted in a perfect dish-shaped concavity.
            The cops are friendly and polite.
            They had merely put to her one question: ‘Something on your mind, maybe?’
           ‘No. It’s nothing,’ she answers dryly with a false smile. ‘Unless, perhaps, you’re a deputation from the Thought Police.’
            A day later she vanishes without a trace to reemerge half a decade later.
            In Thought Police in 2008 there are quoted a few key passages from her diary into which she had copied extracts from Chekhov’s sinister cautionary tale, The Bet, whose unnamed young hero has himself incarcerated voluntarily for fifteen years in a well-stocked library – in solitary confinement – to win a bet of two million roubles wagered by a banker.
            ‘The prisoner (writes Theresa), in four years, amazingly, reads over six hundred volumes and when, after fifteen years of confinement in which he imbibes the world’s classics, he emerges into daylight, his appearance is almost spectral. His face is yellow, his cheeks are hollow, his hair is streaked with silver, and no one can believe that he is only forty! He is a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones and long matted curls like ... like, well, like my own, if I’m honest. But what does the prisoner declare upon his release that I would not myself assert were I to meet that hateful unconscionable banker!?
            ‘ “Your books have given me wisdom. All man’s unresting thought from the ages is compressed into the small compass of my brain. I know that I am wiser than all of you. And I despise your books, as I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage ... as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor ...” ’

            Theresa evidently empathised strongly with Chekhov’s disillusioned bookish captive, but she herself denied at the time a Freudo-Marxist view of alienation to explain her own anomie and other related neurotica. Her attempt at a conclusive account of her ordeal of abduction and imprisonment and of her remarkable escape are now compressed within the quire of pages that contains her narrative, A Room to the End of Fall.
            But, despite her valiant efforts, she hesitantly draws our attention to the paradox that arises from her attempts to synthesize the estimated two million words she wrote in those years of isolation, a period not dissimilar to the length of incarceration suffered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp during WWII by the son of the Norwegian polar explorer Nansen.
            The published diary of Nansen fils runs to 600 pages yet his bulky edited volume, recording in detail those years of daily witness to unimaginable horrors, amounts to only one-third of the original manuscript.
            Like the wartime diarist, Theresa has found the task of distillation is more time consuming than the task of composition. As she says, despairingly, ‘It’s as though I have all the concordances to the Bible and Shakespeare but not the Works themselves.’

Secret cellars: sinister cases of abduction and imprisonment.

Since those decades-long, repeated draftings of A Room to the End of Fall (there is even a variant screenplay, The Chute), three notorious cases of abduction and imprisonment of young women have come to light. A schoolgirl, abducted aged 10 in 1998, and imprisoned in a secret cellar for more than eight years, until her escape in 2006. The case of an 18-year-old daughter, held prisoner by her father in a locked windowless dungeon in the basement area of her family home, and emerging to freedom in 2008 after 24 years of captivity. And as recently as May this year, the escape from captivity of three kidnapped women held prisoner for up to decade or more in complete subjugation and restraint only yards from the freedom of a suburban American street. 
            The prevalence of this crime is explored by the Austrian Nobel-prize-winner, Elfriede Jelinek**, in her searing essay of 2008, Im Verlassenen (The Forsaken Place), in which she analyses the phallocentric base motives that drive the abductors, while at the same time virulently indicting her fellow countrymen, ‘Austria is a small world in which the greater one holds its rehearsals.’
            In essence, her argument is an attack on the droit de seigneur assumed by the patriarchal male, and the notion of rights of possession, to the extent of an immurement of one’s love-object in an oubliette with no bars between which the abductee can glimpse the sky. ‘No bars, no iron rods exist here. It isn’t even possible to see through something, through which one could take a look, to see no world.’
            ‘Keine Stäbe, keine Gitterstäbe hier vorhanden. Es ist also nicht einmal möglich, zwischen etwas, durch das man hindurchschauen kann, auch keine Welt zu sehen.’ 
            The irony here, of course, is Jelinek’s conscious re-echoing of Rilke’s The Panther:

... it can take in nothing more.

He feels as though a thousand bars existed,

and no more world beyond them than before.

            Irony? Well, I’ve always considered it a supreme paradox that this cultivator of heightened sensibilities should, upon fathering a daughter, have given up the infant to her grandparents to dedicate himself to the pursuit of his art ... in other words, leaving the child in a ‘forsaken place’, the oubliette of the patriarchal heart. 
            Crocodile tears.

Elfriede Jelinek                                        Horst Bienek

The Abduction of a Bluestocking by a Bluebeard?

Well, here is an opportunity to categorically state that the sinister ‘forsaken place’ of A Room to the End of Fall is not the setting for the abduction of a bluestocking by a Bluebeard ... however, Theresa Ollivante’s ‘forsaken place’, like the isolation cell of protagonists in certain German folkloric precursors – Cellar-boy Kaspar Hauser, Rumpelstilzchen, Rapunzel, et al. – is, nevertheless, so fiendishly sealed off from humanity that my captive is doomed, as Chekhov puts it, to spend the years of ‘... captivity under the strictest supervision ... [the captive] should not be free to cross the threshold ... to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive letters and newspapers.’

            Only Germans, I may add, in contrast to a Russian’s choice of a library for incarceration, have the apt maxim for such furtive concealment.

Eine Leiche im Keller haben.

(To have a corpse in the basement.)

            For, as Chekhov measuredly remarks, in The Bet in 1888 ...

The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if

I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life,

I would certainly choose the second.

To live anyhow is better than not at all.

 *As I remarked in an earlier post, a kinsman of mine, Horst Bienek (1930-1990), is author of Die Zelle (The Cell, 1968), which is derives from his own imprisonment by the Soviets and relates a prisoner’s struggle for mental and physical survival in the face of solitary confinement, sickness, torture, and an uncertain fate.  A first person narrative and a classic of prison literature, Die Zelle uses stream of consciousness to agonizing effect. The truly excellent English translation is by Ursula Mahlendorf, who describes the work as an example of Lazarine Literature, a term attributed to French poet, Jean Cayrol, interned in Gusen concentation camp in 1943. The figure of Lazarus appears many times in Cayrol's work. Having escaped death himself, Cayrol was fascinated and inspired by the story of Lazarus who returns from the dead.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/immured-mustard-field-found.html 

**It is indeed curious, to me at least, that Jelinek’s English publisher (Serpent’s Tail) was my own, insofar as it published one of my earliest works of fiction, The Cheated Eye (1998). 

●

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html