The Brueghel Moon

Plot

The Brueghel Moon is a novella about a psychiatrist, Levan, who has a former patient, Nunu, visit him, then he goes to a garden party, and gets involved with the wife of an ambassador, Ana-Maria. Actually, the time line is a bit messed up so Levan might have gone to the garden party and then had Nunu visit him. Novel set in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Levan, who starts out the book whining about white man problems, i.e. he's middle class and bored and unfulfilled and self-sabotaging, spends a fair amount of the book whining about white man problems and ends the book still trapped in his white man problems. Ana-Maria also whines a fair deal about her rich white woman problems.. She's rich and bored and unfulfilled and self-sabotaging. Nunu doesn't whine so much. Instead, she talks about how she had sex with aliens and begat a child..

In any case, the alien story comes around and joins with the Ana-Maria story, all nicely wrapped up in a bow, and it's kind of satisfying. Levan seems interested in Ana-Maria for the reason men are often interested in women in stories: she is attractive. Other than that, her personality is kind of dull too. Nunu was pretty awesome, but, likely as to her growing up under Soviet rule, she's a bit passive and accepting of what happens to her too, although her escape from the mental hospital was pretty awesome. You go Nunu, you get your whistle and march on away.

Major themes

The narrative switches around, first person, second person, third person, back to first. We get to see inside Levan and Nunu's head, never Ana-Maria's, but since Ana-Maria seems to vocalize every thought she has to Levan, we're likely not missing much. The switching narrative voice works pretty well with the swaps sometimes being so subtle that it takes a page or two before you realize that now we're back inside Levan's head or the like.

The main protagonist Levan who has been successful until now, but when he has to confront the fact of his wife leaving him, has also to confront the fact that he has seen her all along as a patient rather than an individual. At least, that’s what I think it is about. There’s also a weird sub-plot involving an astrophysicist and a “Visitor” and this fantasy element didn’t seem to integrate well with the rest of the book. The narrative crosses several timelines, perspectives and worlds and each chapter is from a different perspective.

Tamaz Chiladze focuses on moral problems/issues, arisen as a result of too great a self-assuredness of psychologists. In novel, the main character is an up-to-now successful psychotherapist Levan, whose wife has left him. One day she suddenly realised that her marriage is nothing more than fact/reality born out of habit and her family is a branch of a hospital. For her husband she wasn't a beloved wife but just a patient. The heroine finds an exit from the vicious circle of misunderstanding and insensitivity.