It is a love story that doubts the nature of love, an exploration of the redemptive capacity of psychiatry that grapples with the possibility that the self might not be real but only the “flickering wave of some electromagnetic field”. Snow Country, like the turbulent interwar years in which it is set, is more provisional, less sure of its ground. Human Traces is a novel of ideas in the 19th-century tradition, a sweeping epic that tackles big questions about the nature of cognition and the human predisposition to madness. The Schloss, he admits, holds out “possibilities for change”. His wartime experiences have left him deeply scarred.

And yet, for all his scepticism, he finds comfort there. What Martha calls “the great age of belief” in the medicine of the mind is over: Anton dismisses the early ambitions of the clinic as a “well-intentioned but fatal overreaching or, if you were of a religious bent, a doomed attempt to see into the mind of God”. The carnage of the first world war has destroyed the old certainties. The clinic’s lofty ambitions have also been brought down to earth. The clinic, now run by Midwinter’s daughter Martha, has been forced to sell its mountain-top premises and is once again housed in the old sanatorium by the lake. Politically and economically, Austria is in turmoil. In 1933 Anton, commissioned to write a magazine article about “where psychological medicine stands today”, himself travels to the Schloss.

Disappointed first by her father and then by the idealistic lawyer who persuades her to come to Vienna, she takes a job at the Schloss Seeblick where her mother once worked as a cleaner. The sixth child of a drunk and chaotic mother and the only one not to be given up at birth to the local orphanage, Lena is torn between her hunger for love and her determination to take control of her own life. Meanwhile penniless Lena is growing up in small-town Carinthia.

Snow country kawabata