The Brooklyn Rail

Furniture is a loud presence in Fine Gråbøl’s debut novel, What Kingdom. For the unnamed narrator, furnishings witness and respond to her: “I’m especially absorbed by the chairs; the way they receive me and others in the room, the light on them in the mornings.” The preoccupation towards certain objects—“Out of principle I own nothing that might die”—diverts her gaze from the reality of the space she inhabits, the fifth floor of a residential complex for psychiatric patients in the center of Copenhagen. While this floor is only temporary accommodation for younger patients aged eighteen to thirty who are allowed to stay for a maximum of four years, accommodation for residents on other floors is permanent.

Released in 2021 in Denmark and newly translated into English by Martin Aitken, What Kingdom follows the happenings, routines and upheavals for these residents through an often stream-of-consciousness prose. The chapters are brief, rarely longer than a page. The fixation on furniture guides the reader’s entry through this facility. Gråbøl doesn’t allow quick assessments towards other characters. Simultaneously we don’t dwell with just the narrator’s interior space for long; the lack of privacy on such premises forbids it. This public cohabitation is gestured at on the first page when the narrator notes that Waheed, one of the residents, “keeps 50 Cent turned up loud in the night. Perhaps that’s how he tries to trick his thoughts into changing direction.”

The community of fellow patients, both temporary and permanent residents, read as an ensemble—Marie, Helle, Sara, Hector, Waheed, Lasse, Kian. Their efforts to establish routine and take up activities are shared—each resident has a meal day to choose what they all eat, collectively they establish an agenda to obtain a karaoke machine. They take outdoor excursions to the corner shop for cigarettes and ice cream, or to a larger supermarket where support from staff is required: “The last time I was in Netto I found myself five hundred and sixty-eight kroner short when my items had been scanned, I’d bought about a thousand kroner’s worth of things.” The sheer abundance is a stark contrast to her minimal room.

Throughout What Kingdom Gråbøl is critical of psychiatric care and the relationships that develop between staff and patients: “people who’ve learned how to protect themselves in their interactions with psychiatric patients but who’ve never taught us the same self-care in our interactions with the health system.” The structures of group meals, eating breakfast every day and trips to the shop, don’t prepare patients for re-entering the world.

Gråbøl compares the efficacy of the complex to other contemporary infrastructures: “superhospitals, supermarkets, supercenters. This accommodation facility is no exception.” Like the postmodernist constructions of residential vertical cities in the twentieth century, floors have different facilities, purposes, and eligibility for residents. On the fifth floor the narrator is supposed to learn skills meant to help her when she leaves but as she notes, “You could ask why all these sick people had to be put together under the same precarious roof, and you wouldn’t be surprised by the answer.” Gråbøl, it seems, is making a commentary on state-run spatial infrastructures, and their capacity to either support or inhibit people’s ability to thrive.

Artist Etel Adnan said memory is preserved in spaces, in buildings, in their stones. In this smaller super-facility of What Kingdom, the narrator sees furniture as large and as dominant as a city’s stones. She has a close relationship to the section leader, Thomas. When she learns he is leaving, she experiences a violent episode. But when Thomas actually departs, she refers to it indirectly, stating, “A room doesn’t stop being a room just because you leave it.” The room still holds his presence and its functions.

The focus on space initially suggests the mental and physical severity of the narrator’s conditions are secondary, but eventually the visceral scenes pour in. Her stomach is pumped. She vomits. She overdoses. She cuts her arms with a razor. Her vocal chords are separated with a ventilator tube. These scenes are juxtaposed with attempts to resolve her illness beyond taking the pills that are prescribed to her. “We need to draw up your action plan,” she is told. “Write some things down that could make your daily living easier.”

While the subject is heavy, Gråbøl’s prose is often light. The narrator’s unfiltered voice is pleasantly blunt towards commonly held mundanities and anxieties. Declarations such as “I don’t know how to live up to the clothes I wear,” call to mind dialogue in scenes in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s television series Fleabag. This tone of forthcoming brashness tied to objects is extended to the handling of patients: “Transferring from the hospital to the residential facility was wild, as if now I was going to be a person with a bag.”

In What Kingdom, Gråbøl eschews the tropes on writing of psychiatric facilities and mental health. Scenes of physical struggle are not melodramatic but rather often distanced in the background, effectively eliminating the voyeuristic gaze through which psychiatric patients or those struggling with mental health issues are so often viewed. As the narrator casts her eyes on carpets, walls, windows, illuminating an aesthetic intentionality towards space, Gråbøl provides a humanizing view of the facility’s cast of residents, and a thoughtful critique of Denmark’s state support for those who seek mental health care.