A Void Filled with Possibilities

The protagonist of Antônio Xerxenesky’s novel ‘An Infinite Sadness,’ newly translated by Daniel Hahn, searches for ‘something beyond psychological solutions’ at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.

By Rachel GerryFebruary 5, 2026

• Fiction

NICOLAS LEGRAND, a French psychoanalyst, works at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. It’s the 1950s, and he’s there to treat patients struggling with the psychological fallout of World War II. If he arrived with a belief that Freudian therapy could drudge up the hindering baggage and set a person free, his time at the center proves the project more complex—especially after he discovers in his patients “a sadness the size of the universe, which expanded in space, which recognised no borders, a cosmic sadness.”

We are offered a few case studies. There’s L., a burly ex-soldier who refuses to speak, proud of the military achievements that have left him in abject misery; Mary, a woman who unintentionally worked on the atomic bomb, now driven mad by retroactive awareness; and Emil, a paranoiac clerk employed by an ethically dubious insurance agency, “one of the main enablers of the Third Reich.” Each person’s suffering forces Nicolas up against the banality of evil, its deep and meaningless kernel. For him, the tethering of pain and guilt to something as flimsy as thoughtlessness or political pressure is a psychological absurdity, unrecognizable in its lack of content.

Brazilian novelist Antônio Xerxenesky, in his 2021 novel An Infinite Sadness (recently translated into English by Daniel Hahn), offers a range of perspectives to try and make sense of “this sadness [that] never ends.” Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl has a cameo in the book, offering meaning as the primary factor in a patient’s healing: “Even […] their suffering can be the meaning.” But Nicolas is hostile to this argument, finding it punitive, a philosophical contortion to rationalize a sadness that remains abstruse. He rejects Jung’s “kitsch mysticism” as well, instead exploring heredity, human nature, and hypochondria. But his ongoing inability to locate the precise core of this bone-deep melancholy makes his work seem a kind of wheel-spinning exercise: all thoughtful paths reach an impasse. The treatment he offers is at best humanizing, at worst intrusive, and mostly just ineffectual.

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In the genre of sanatorium literature, An Infinite Sadness stands apart. It doesn’t have much of the fellow feeling that defines Thomas Mann’s classic The Magic Mountain (1924), in which Hans Castorp, bowled over by love and intellectual companionship, struggles to leave the Berghof hospital. In Christa Wolf’s August (2012), the protagonist reflects on the affecting compassion of a fellow resident in a TB clinic, while in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), the bonds among the patients form the basis of their resistance to institutional authority. Alphonse Daudet, while seeking relief from spinal pain in a thermal spa, wrote that “the patients, in all their weirdness and diversity, draw comfort from the demonstration that their respective illnesses all have something in common.” Stories set in sanatoriums tend to show their characters slowly settling into their new homes, the world slipping away, time taking on different proportions. Separated from the imperatives of productivity, the sanatorium is an imaginative space in which the future is null and progress uncertain. As sickness becomes the rule instead of the exception, the patient begins to exist authentically, in a reality defined by a community of fellow sufferers.

The treatment center in An Infinite Sadness, by contrast, is defined by isolation. Patients appear alone. Community is a liability. Nicolas wonders if melancholia “might […] be contagious too, transmissible like the influenza virus.” His theory seems to be right: after holding several sessions with his patient Emil, who frequently liaises with Satan, he experiences a “hallucinatory phenomenon” of his own, a terrifying vision of an eyeless child in the woods.

In a novel about disintegration, it would seem odd that Xerxenesky keeps us at arm’s length from interiority. The writing is sturdy, matter of fact, even vaguely upbeat, as if to prevent the reader from fully identifying with anyone’s pain. There’s a once-upon-a-time quality to the third-person narration that belongs to a different world: a carefully executed tonal clash in which breakdown is tightly controlled. In the pseudo-objectivity of the novel’s voice, Xerxenesky shows the rigor and rationality of the hard sciences as an invasion into the sacred space of the sanatorium. The etiological understanding of disease and the invention of new chemical solutions have eclipsed recovery as a more gradual process, often conducted in communion with nature and with others. While treating (or failing to treat) his patients’ fathomless sadness, Nicolas is instructed to use a groundbreaking new drug, chlorpromazine, known to have positive effects on certain disorders.

The advent of the drug sends Nicolas into an immediate crisis of faith. What does it mean to have devoted one’s life to the exploration of the mind? To have dug diligently into this alien domain, navigating moral ambiguities to reach its emotional bedrock, if all the tumult could be resolved with a pill? Pharmaceutical solutions disregard the depth of patient testimony, reducing the complexity of the unconscious to mere physicochemical reflexes. Nicolas comes to see himself as a kind of monk in scrubs: his soft “scientific” credentials undermined, his practice can now only be spiritual—a notion he finds unmooring.

The book circles obsessively around this question of where the hard sciences really lead us. Nicolas’s wife, Anna, works in Geneva at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, where she obsesses over questions of metaphysical significance. She has a habit of offering Nicolas new perspectives on quantum physics. The two spend increasingly tense country evenings rehashing the misguided notion that reality “does obey rules, physical laws, natural laws”—that, in Einstein’s famous words, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Anna retorts that, within an atom, “what happens violates all logic. It’s a void that’s filled with possibilities.” There’s a fundamental randomness to reality; nobody can truly explain what’s going on, the scientists often finding themselves “confused like little children.” Of course, nobody knows how chlorpromazine works either—it simply does. Sometimes.

Psychopharmacology makes Freud—and, by association, Nicolas—into a mystic. The inside of the atom cannot be seen or understood, only deduced, much like Freud’s unconscious, which invisibly governs the self. The structure of the atom, comprised of a “huge, preposterous emptiness,” mirrors the mind, also unbearably roomy, such that it can be filled with many things: ideology, love, delusion, melancholy. The cloud of possibilities within the atom can be stilled only in moments of human perception and measurement, just as the inchoate dreams and yearnings of the patient are crystallized in the presence of the analyst. If the universe’s code is as unbreakable as the mind’s, trying to solve it would be a fool’s errand, its own form of madness. To envision these symmetries, as Xerxenesky seems set on doing, is to search for something beyond psychological solutions, to find a place of genuine awe.

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If the questions in An Infinite Sadness seem wide-eyed, cosmic, and a bit overwrought, I blame the mountains. When I visited Davos, Switzerland—an alpine resort once filled with sanatoriums, as well as the inspiration for Magic Mountain—I went with the conviction that the place would reveal some truth about illness. “Any landscape is a condition of the spirit,” said Henri-Frédéric Amiel, the Swiss poet-philosopher, and I was after the mischievous, tenderhearted, philosophical spirit that animates Mann’s novel, with its canny elevation of the “horizontal world” of the sick.

Something about the green rising up from grassy fields to pine-laden hills, with icy peaks ascending beyond them, made me feel entirely apart, ennobled in my aloofness. Xerxenesky describes the landscape as “otherworldly.” Early in the text, Nicolas is walking up the mountain, feeling as though “he’d found some portal to this strange land, or, a simpler explanation, as if he’d just dropped off to sleep and this was a dream—light, fragile—that any sudden jolt might bring to an end.” It’s true that you think differently on a mountain. Shrouded in its privacy and protection, you can postpone waking up. An Infinite Sadness occupies this dreamlike space, the way it makes possible discrete kinds of meaning. For Nicolas, the mountain “is eternity,” a highly specific place that seems to open into “a whole universe […] with its own laws,” apart from everything.

In the Alps, the air is thin. Breathing is less about taking in the environment, feeling it enter your lungs, than allowing it to flow through you, ghostly and undetected. It could be that there’s something dangerous in this ethereal immersion. Perhaps the novel’s opening sentence is an arch warning: “Important not to forget the altitude.”