The house of illnesses

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A complete facsimile of the manuscript and illustrations, interleaved with a translation by Malcolm Green.00It is 25 years since Atlas Press first published Unica Zürn?s autobiographical account of the commencement of her long history of mental crises ('The Man of Jasmine', soon to be republished). In the meantime she has come to be recognised as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Zürn?s initial mental collapse was initiated when she encountered ?the Man of Jasmine? in the real world in the person of the writer Henri Michaux. Her meeting with him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. ?The House of Illnesses? was the first of her notebooks to confront this oncoming catastrophe which, paradoxically, she in part welcomed, since it gave her access to an inner existence essential to her artistic output.00In 1970 she committed suicide by throwing herself from the sixth-floor apartment that she shared with Bellmer