The Kingdom of Want
Adam Brock, a 37 year-old psychiatrist, is called in to evaluate Anna, a beautiful, enigmatic young girl who is suspected of murdering her mother. Adam has to decide whether she is fit to stand trial. Filled with a deep malaise, he leaves his wife Miriam and withdraws into himself. There, he returns to his life with his adoptive father Ernest, the head of a psychiatric institute, and to the personalities of the patients.
With a steady hand, Aya Kaniuk interweaves present and past, slowly revealing the connections between the characters. Relationships between parents and children are always deficient or distorted, while substitute “adopted” ones provide vitality and comfort. Man is basically alone: with his body, with his consciousness and its reflections in the world. Little by little Adam’s life unravels until it disintegrates completely. But in the process, there is also reconstruction. The question remains: Can he break through the loneliness of his kingdom of want?
Aya Kaniuk’s debut novel is a profound, remarkable literary achievement. It describes the tiniest movements of mind and soul while retaining a sense of mystery of the human condition. Kaniuk writes with rare sensitivity and intensity.
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“Aya Kaniuk’s first novel is a great novel, and I don’t mean in its size, which is unusual in the local first-novel scene (and also in contemporary Hebrew literature in general), but also in the unusual maturity of its language, plot and the characters that it depicts. The Kingdom of Want is not a book that was written in haste and is not a mere release of creative energy. It is a rich and dense work that ripened over time.
This is a profound book, multi-layered and at times mesmerizing. In her first book, Kaniuk offers a mature and autonomous voice, free of the shadow of forefathers.” -
“Aya Kaniuk recounts from the inside, with much loyalty, the lives, the stormy emotions and the fixation of the inmates, both involuntary and voluntary, of hospitals for the mentally ill. She steers clear of romanticized, exaggerated or prettifying accounts of the lives of the mentally ill”