Lieke Marsman was 27 when she was diagnosed with a rare, incurable cartilage cancer — small balls of failed tissue colonising her lungs, she writes, that would one day suffocate her. She was 35 when she died, in June of this year. What she produced in between is not a cancer memoir in any recognisable sense. There is almost no body in this book. The temperature of her anus, she observes drily, does not affect the temperature of the world. What there is, instead, is a sustained philosophical unravelling. Marsman was a committed materialist and positivist, and this book tracks the gradual, honest dissolution of those commitments under the pressure of imminent death. She opens herself to God. She reads about the supernatural. She wonders, with full awareness of how this sounds, whether aliens might come and take her away. The book's title is not ironic. It is a genuine wish. The range of references she deploys is extraordinary and entirely unperformative: Leopardi, Pasolini, Wittgenstein, Spinoza, Euripides, Robert Musil, William James, and Alanis Morissette in the same breath, without strain. The most charged sections involve not artists reflecting on mortality but scientists — cosmologist James Jeans among them — who admitted uncertainty about the very frameworks they built. Marsman finds company in that admission. She is not abandoning reason; she is watching reason confess its own limits. The book is also, consistently, funny. She and her girlfriend spent hundreds of euros on empanadas because, as she notes, even when you're dying you have to eat and those things only need a blast in the oven. Waking from surgery without her arm, the first thing she craved was a croissant. She lists absurd things she could do to spice up her obituary — paraglider crash, go-kart incident — with the timing of a comedian who knows the audience is already on her side. Sophie Collins's translation deserves explicit credit. The prose reads as if it arrived in English fully formed — the wit survives, the philosophical precision survives, the strange tonal blend of the cosmic and the mundane survives. This is hard to do, and it is done here without visible effort. The Guardian reviewer acknowledges the unusual ethical situation of reviewing a book whose author cannot respond, and who died before the piece was published. That honesty is appropriate. There is something vertiginous about reviewing a testament — the word the reviewer uses, correctly. But Marsman herself was a critic and a poet; she understood that books, once published, become public objects, not private ones. She would likely have welcomed the argument. The book ends with Marsman's own formulation of what she came to: dying with hope, however far-fetched, is always better than living without it. That is not a consolation. It is a position, hard-won, philosophically earned. On Another Planet They Can Save Me is short, dense, and written with the concentration of someone who knows exactly how much time she has.
