Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová, translated from the Czech by Tereza Novická, Twisted Spoon Press, 2025
In “The Aleph,” Jorge Luis Borges’s eponymous narrator attempts to describe the titular object—a point in space that contains all other points—but finally articulates that he cannot truly do so: “Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. . . Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction.” Borges is far from the only writer to fear that fiction might distort truth or one’s simple lived experience. In the way of Barthes, who wrote that “incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order,” Borges’s attempt to translate the aleph functions as a useful thought experiment: How does one coherently translate an experience or text that is fundamentally incoherent? Should one even try?
Ceilings, Zuzana Brabcová’s second novel to be posthumously translated into English, represents an aleph of sorts. It is about a woman named Emička (or Ema) who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital, but it is also about Emička’s imaginary brother, Ash, who is committed to the same hospital—because he both is and is not Ema herself. As for the hospital, it’s certainly a hospital, but it also shapeshifts to become an aquarium, Ema’s childhood home, and an IKEA. Plenty of readers will take the easy route and try to interpret these inconsistencies as reflections of Ema’s unstable mental state, but Brabcová disrupts this reading by refusing to settle on a clear narrator. She shifts between the third person and Ema’s/Ash’s perspective, sometimes all within a single paragraph. Thus, while perhaps not as untranslatable as the aleph, Ceilings provides no shortage of challenges: its circuitous syntax, its treatment of time, its slippery subject matter.
Tereza Veverka Novická, who also translated Brabcová’s English debut, Aviaries, has bravely and fluently rendered Brabcová’s work, and her talents are most evident when she captures the author’s dark humor. In one of the novel’s many dreamlike sequences, Ema searches for her daughter Rybka in a cathedral: “She’d seen her share of Christs, but none had had six toes like this one — proof that this was all a dream. The difference between dream and reality, fiction and fact, and maybe life and death as well, was consequently nearly imperceptible, because it lay in that one single supernumerary toe.” While you could probably quibble with the use of “supernumerary” here, Novická doesn’t just mirror Brabcová’s glossy syntax—she creates a marvelously deadpan English translation. In a sense, Christ’s extra toe functions as a useful (if absurd) keyhole by which we can access the text.
Like with the six-toed Christ, Ceilings commits itself to defying conventional form. It is a book about fluid boundaries. Extra appendages. Points in time and space that (inexplicably) contain other points. For this reason, I struggle to read Brabcová’s writing on mental illness as an engagement with the texture and experience of mental illness itself. Ema is not Brabcová’s only character to be hospitalized with a psychiatric disorder, and it has been suggested that Brabcová’s interest in the subject matter is drawn from her own personal experience. However, in Ceilings, Ema’s unsteady grasp on reality reads more like an opportunity for Brabcová to explore new formal possibilities; the book is written by someone who seems to believe that the boundaries between “dream and reality, fact and fiction” are already thin. Ema’s illness may be a plot device, but it is also a way to dissolve the architecture we conventionally associate with the novel, making Ceilings a space for ontological play.
It’s reasonable though to detect some tension here in the idea that a psychiatric hospital might represent a site for play and possibility, and Brabcová works through this by tapping into a deep tradition of Czech fabulism. Ceilings harkens back to Kafka and classic Czech fairy tales, weaving their characteristic motif of human-animal transformations with the dreamlike textures found in surrealist painting. “Her new skin was now covered in a mesh of bluish luminescent lights, and Ema pushed off with all the might of her new body against the current through the opening in the wall,” Brabcová writes. “The eel glided, undulating through the flooded bowels of the pavilion, higher and higher, lightly slipping past the pitfalls the narrow tunnel put in its way.” In this passage, which launches a (lengthy!) sequence wherein Ema navigates the hospital/water as an eel, Brabcová’s aesthetic and intellectual project comes into focus. Even in a more “objective” third-person narration, we are still faced with the problems of a fluid body, an unstable setting, and a more unsettling narratological question: Are we supposed to think of this action as a hallucinatory symptom or a fantasy? And does it make a difference?
Eventually a wave hurls “what was left of her, ashore. Neither dead nor alive, she nestled in a tangle of seaweed with a single wish—for it to be just an ordinary bed in downstairs detox.” Whereas in a conventional fairy tale, one might expect a wish to launch the narrative into a surreal space, here the sequence ends with Ema’s wishes for the ordinary. She wants to return to a space marked by firm boundaries, but the hospital is flooded, existing between stable identities as neither psychiatric clinic nor ocean—and Ema is “neither dead nor alive.” Here, the hospital’s porous, shapeshifting boundaries escalates into a site of potential terror.
Of course, with Brabcová, we would do best to avoid binaries. As with any aleph, this book and its setting dwell in a place where play and terror occur simultaneously—and who are we to demand that illness be finalized into something easily digestible, or that our great authors sling hot takes about psychiatric disorders? And yet, given its content, Ceilings lands in the English-speaking world at a particularly fascinating moment; over the last few years, no shortage of keystrokes have been devoted to documenting and debating the relationship between severe psychiatric disorders and our digital media ecosystem. Critics have suggested that social media users are romanticizing or trivializing mental illnesses, or have argued that the resulting content is being inappropriately used as a tool for self-diagnosis. (Look no further than the supposed TikTok-inspired surge of teenagers claiming symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder.) In response, literary culture in the United States has turned toward novels that seek to “lift the veil” and depict psychiatric disorders for their “grim, ugly reality,” such as Frederik DeBoer’s forthcoming The Mind Reels. In this context, Brabcová’s ambivalence toward the psychiatric hospital and the destabilizing nature of Ema’s mental illness may strike readers as confused, or even sensationalist.
Confusion, sensationalism—these are fair protests, but also forgivable offenses. At their best, these might even be the offenses that make a novel sing. Consider one particularly confusing (and maybe just sensational) passage:
I’m in a room, I need to get out, I rise to the ceiling. I tear through it, relatively easily, because the walls and ceiling are made of cardboard, and find myself in another room. I escape through a chink into another room and so on and so forth, again and again, one room replaces another, always the ceiling, never the sky. But what if it’s not the dream that’s come back to me, but it’s me who’s come back to it? Maybe the waking life of Ema Černá is merely a sequence of pauses, brief interruptions of flight with no beginning and no end.
Once again, Brabcová treats the world around Ema as malleable, and does not indicate whether we should be reading the action as reality or metaphor, fiction or poetry. Here, every ceiling opens to another ceiling, every narrative inconsistency opens to another narrative inconsistency, never transcending ceiling for sky, never resolving what comes before—as in a dream.
These fluid spaces may invite confusion, but they also allow Brabcová much needed latitude for aesthetic and thematic exploration. It’s amongst these possibilities that she gives gender fluidity an especially playful treatment. Ema’s identity toggles between her own and her brother’s consistently throughout the novel, but in the book’s final scene, Ash fuses with her daughter, Rybka, as well. If a book can represent a point that contains all other points, so can a person. As a “plane” soars above the “ceilings of the world,” this fluidity feels like a cause for joy: “She was sitting next to my brother Ash as they looked through her drawings of tadpole people, and with their heads leaning against one another, as though one were growing out of the other, nothing but rustling and laughter.”
Garrett Biggs is a fiction writer, critic, and PhD candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Utah.
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