What happens after you wage an absurd war? Meaning shatters in stages long after what Porter called “the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns.” Into the “dead cold light of tomorrow,” patients file into the Swiss sanitarium where Nicolas, the psychiatrist protagonist of the first of Xerxenesky’s book to be translated into English, finds himself disquieted. By his complicity in caring, by the introduction of chlorpromazine, by the bourgeois nature of his profession, by the limits of science, and by the absence of religion. When there is time for everything, even the psychiatrist can realize he understands nothing, nothing at all. Bless him, Xerxenesky understands what it means to be a shrink.