In the late ’80s, Knipfel was studying philosophy at the University of Minnesota and trying repeatedly – and lamely – to kill himself: “Four years of philosophy might make you want to kill yourself,” he says, “but it’s not nearly enough to help you go through with it.” However, when an overdose of pills landed him in the hospital, he suddenly found himself a guest of the state in a locked ward. There, aside from his 10-minute weekly visits with a bored shrink, he had nothing to do but read French semioticist Jacques Lacan and watch his fellow patients. One rode an exercise bike all day. One constantly wept. Others at least looked sane, like Chaim, who tended to end “sentences with increasingly large numbers.
" ‘Isn’t it a great day, four thousand two hundred and sixty-seven?’ he’d ask.
‘I’ll say!’ I’d reply.”
Knipfel never romanticizes insanity – most of the people he met in the locked ward were there for good reasons. But while he has nothing but compassion for his fellow inmates, and while he claims to have enjoyed certain aspects of his cure – “I enjoyed my time on a locked ward… the food was okay and my bed was comfortable” – he has nothing but contempt for his keepers and no illusions about the effectiveness of his treatment. “I was locked away in that ward in Minneapolis because I was a self-destructive young man. Months later, I left the ward a self-destructive young man.” He also left with the raw materials for a great story that is both heartbreaking and funny, often in the same paragraph. Question his sanity maybe, but never his talent.
Quitting the Nairobi TrioJim Knipfel (Putnam) 285 pages. $23.95
