cover image Night Duty

Night Duty

Melitta Breznik. Steerforth Press, $12 (131pp) ISBN 978-1-883642-85-3

This short, sparely written and stunning first novel portrays a besieged and resolute doctor, her alcoholic father and the damage he's done to his grown children. Breznik, a psychiatrist born in Austria, now practicing in Zurich, uses her psychoanalytic expertise to good effect, setting her fiction apart from other novels about family trauma. The narrator, a pathologist in her 30s, strives for professional detachment as she visits her patients, first those she treats in the hospital, and then her own father, once outgoing and friendly, now shriveled, debilitated and floating in a fog of blurred memories, his recurrent headaches aggravated by the metal plate in his skull implanted after an operation. Breznik never names her major characters, which accentuates her clinical stance: this family portrait is as coolly precise and jolting as an Egon Schiele painting. The pathologist's stream-of-consciousness flashbacks fill in a roster of other disasters: we learn of her German mother, shunned as an outsider in Austria; of her dead brother; of another brother, a sullen runaway; of life in wartime Austria. Father is not entirely unsympathetic: he enlists in the Austrian army to avoid having to join the Nazi Party. Mother has heart attacks, attempts suicide and finally separates from her husband. The narrator's stoic resolve in facing her father's death renders this unflinching look at life's messy end-game oddly bracing and brave. (Apr.)