A Severed Head

10 hrs. 49 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Iris Murdoch

Narrator Nikolay Savitskiy

Description

The novel "The Severed Head" is distinguished by an intricate psychological depth conveyed through powerful narrative energy and the interweaving of the heroes’ characters. The author is interested in the mechanisms of the relationship between a domineering person and the victim. Can the victim break free?

One thing is when a wife leaves for a best friend—there is a sweet little girlfriend for that case. Another is when it turns out that the wife has been cheating with the brother for her entire life; that the brother tried to steal the mistress away; that the mistress fell in love with the new husband of the former wife; and that he, in turn, sleeps with his own sister—who ultimately ends up, in the end, as a skeleton in a closet.

This, seemingly, playful carousel is accompanied by shifts that are by no means harmless in their subconscious. As a result, banal love tangles take on far from harmless proportions.

At the center of this novel, besides everything mentioned above, is obsession. In clinical cases it’s treated with nothing more than antidepressants. But sometimes the patient consciously refuses to leave the state of a manic dependence. And the worst thing is if this dependence is love—toward a mistress, toward the wife with her lover, and toward… the severed head. Psychoanalysts do everything they can to advise not to read horrors written by complex, overwrought authors. Iris approaches it philosophically. After all, the novel is written from the point of view of the stronger sex—and digging into the pathological cracks of gray matter, especially male gray matter, is her favorite pastime.