Panoptikum
A powerful debut novel about fifteen-year-old Anais in a closed juvenile detention center. A poignant story of trauma, resistance, surveillance, and the search for identity in a system that destroys.
Panopticon (2012) is the debut novel by Scottish author Jenni Fagan, which follows fifteen-year-old Anais Hendricks, a girl who is brought by the police to a closed juvenile detention center called "Panopticon". Covered in blood and accused of attacking a comatose policewoman, Anais doesn't remember what happened.
Born in a psychiatric hospital, abandoned by her mother, and passed around through dozens of foster families, Anais grew up in a system that betrayed her at every turn. At the Panopticon – an institution inspired by Bentham's model of total surveillance – she meets other rejected teenagers with whom she forms a fragile but intense family bond. The novel is raw, brutal, and authentic: full of street language, drugs, violence, sexuality, trauma, and dark humor.
Fagan masterfully delves into Anais's psyche, portraying a girl who is at once fragile, rebellious, intelligent and witty. The book raises questions about society's care system, surveillance, stigmatization and the possibility of resistance. Despite the darkness, there is a smoldering hope and humanity within.
Hailed as one of the best debuts of the decade (Granta Best of Young British Novelists), the novel is a powerful, poetic and politically courageous voice of the marginalized. Read in an excellent Croatian translation a moving testimony of those who have been written off by society.
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