Read a lot again”) an occasional, jarring flippancy. There are minor irritations: Melle’s habit of assuming familiarity with his previous works a hurried diaristic flatness that intermittently washes out his style (“Did my rounds, still filled with shame. And he’s sadly on the mark when he admits that bipolar disorder is “not an illness that elicits empathy.” The tragedy of the afflicted is that they drift helplessly into the realm of the sinister friends and colleagues want to help, only to eventually back off, fearing that they will become targets of paranoid vitriol or abuse. He’s astute on the agonies of shame endured when the mania ends and the depression sets in (“Depression is not a lack of feeling, which is what I had imagined, it is a constant humiliation”). Not so amusing are the passages where Melle attempts suicide by overdose and fakes his own death, or his frequent hospitalizations. Dick observed in his novel of psychosis “Valis,” the mentally disturbed eschew simple interpretations and “shoot for the baroque.” In Melle’s messianic delusions even “Hitler had in the end believed that he was me.” Literally everything is about him - “right down to the Gaza Strip” - and everyone is either on his side or out to get him. Soon however, accelerated by early blogging culture and online forums, his madness is unmistakable - and alienates his friends and peers. The onset of Melle’s bipolar disorder coincides with his emergence as an acclaimed novelist, and at first his megalomania is camouflaged by the typically grandiose ambition of the young writer.
“When I had sex with Madonna, I felt good for a moment,” he writes in the opening pages - a foretaste of the weird delusions and extreme derangement that follow, in which celebrities like Björk, Trent Reznor and Günter Grass are coordinates in the internal cosmology of a psyche utterly spinning out. The others were in 20 (an epilogue brings us up to 2016, the year the book was first published in Germany). “The World at My Back” recounts three prolonged manic episodes and their painful aftermaths, the first in 1999, when Melle was in his 20s and newly living in Berlin.
Joining the likes of Kay Redfield Jamison’s “An Unquiet Mind,” Leonora Carrington’s “Down Below” and, more recently, Arnold Thomas Fanning’s harrowing “Mind on Fire,” is the German novelist and translator Thomas Melle’s illuminating memoir of the illness that has devastated his life. When they are successful, such reports grant us rare access to the psychic antipodes - a chaotic realm of hyper-signification and cosmic paranoia far beyond the boundaries of healthy consciousness. Living with bipolar disorder - formerly called manic depression - is hard enough, but memoirists afflicted with it face an additional quandary: how to turn their bizarre and frightening experiences into books that grip rather than repel the reader.
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