Hemelhel | Young Adult Fiction

Martinus de Beer

Hemelhel was one of the finalists in Human & Rousseau’s I’m a Writer competition, held in co-operation with Huisgenoot, You and Drum magazines, SABC Education and RSG. It is an absolutely unique portrayal of the time a young sufferer of depression spent in care centre in Bloemfontein. The narrator is a man in his early twenties, and part of his problem is a destructively obsessive relationship. He is a heavy smoker, pretending to be brazen-faced but in reality over sensitive, afraid and nerdy.

The reader experiences the world of the clinic through his eyes. There is no “normal” distance, no external comment – the reader experiences everything on his terms en with his mood swings and with his peculiar whims. In this manner it is as if the whole world, the smallest insignificances, becomes brand new. This tale does not contain the extremes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the clinic at stake could not even remotely be compared to Valkenberg, but the daily sophisticated routines of such a care centre becomes in a strange way just as grave, exactly because this narrator does not try to be funny or austere.

But strangely it is not a gloomy book. In the end it is completely moving, but without being dark. The way it manages to be unintentionally funny saves it from gloom. The way fellow patients and personnel are portrayed, and the way the patients react to their surroundings and circumstances. The humour is partly based on the fact that all these interactions are for them all-important, even their attempts at a kind of silly crassness. And therein lies the power of this book, in the fact that it lets you explore life through the perspective of the depressive person, and in such a way that the reader eventually finds it very difficult to part with that world where, for a while, it was possible to bear heaven and hell simultaneously.