The Sickness

Description

Ernesto Dur n is convinced he is sick. It becomes an obsession far exceeding hypochondria, and when Dr Andr s Miranda gives up responding to e-mails, Dur n resolves to stalk him. The fixation has its own creeping effect on Karina, the hospital secretary, who cannot resist becoming involved. Meanwhile Dr Miranda is coming to terms with a tragedy of his own: his father has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and yet the doctor - the son - finds it impossible to tell him. He hopes that by taking his father on a trip to Isla Margarita, where they once went when he was a child, he might be able to reveal the truth. The nature of sickness as experienced by two individuals provides the backbone to this tender, thoughtful and refined novel. The Sickness is profound and philosophical, and yet written with an agility that expresses the tragedy, but also the comedy of life itself. A brilliantly achieved first novel.

Alberto Barrera Tyszka, poet and novelist, co-wrote the internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed Hugo Ch vez (2007), the first biography of the Venezuelan president. The Sickness won the prestigious Premio Herralde. Margaret Jull Costa is the award-winning translator of Jos Saramago, Javier Mar as, Bernardo Atxaga, E a de Queiroz and Fernando Pessoa.

'This is a short, tersely written novel that distances and invades us at the same time. Powerful themes and powerful writing [does] not let you off or let you down' Susan Hill, Lady. * Lady * 'Promises to place Tyszka at the front rank of new Latin American writers, and, in its poignant dissection of middle-class malaise and familial dynamics, establishes him with a claim to be the Venezuelan Ian McEwan' Booktrust Translated Fiction. * Booktrust Translated Fiction * 'powerful first novel ... gracefully examined to sometimes comic, but ultimately deeply moving effect' Good Book Guide. * Good Book Guide * 'As father and son go on holiday, the doctor's secretary has stories of her own to tell - as medicine, memory and fantasy join in a combustible mixture. In this coolly assured translation by Margaret Jull Costa, Tyszka's fable achieves an almost Coetzee-like level of resonant exactitude' Boyd Tonkin, Independent. * Independent * 'Tyszka's great skill is to evoke an emotional response from a series of lightly sketched but nonetheless highly believable epiphanies. Indeed, the characters here only grow through their burgeoning awareness of mortality, something which results in a story which is as true to death as it is to life' Val Nolan, Irish Examiner. * Irish Examiner * 'The Sickness is refreshingly clean in its storytelling yet very complex in character' Anthony Furey, Times Literary Supplement. * Times Literary Supplement * 'Tyszka is a perceptive, original writer. He has brought an unusually sophisticated understanding to a wonderfully intense, little novel. No sentimentality, no polemic, just emotion at its most resonant' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times. * Irish Times *