How does a good doctor tell his beloved father that he has inoperable cancer? How long can he put off the inevitable and hide his father's mortal condition?
Andres Miranda is a doctor of immunology with 20 years of experience, the only son of a man who did everything he could to help him through the trauma of losing his mother in a plane crash when he was a boy. Javier Miranda's multiple lesions are suggestive of a metastatic disease, but he blames his dizzy spells on the summer heat. He's lean and athletic and though he's 69, he's always enjoyed good health--until now.
Venezualan poet and novelist Alberto Barrera Tyszka's The Sickness is a rattling experience not only because of the hyper-realism of the medical scenes, but also due to the sheer cumulative emotional impact of the story's entangled lives. Dr. Miranda's anguish at the approaching loss of his father is juxtaposed against a string of urgent supplicating e-mails from a former patient. Ernesto Duran has been assured by the doctor that he is in perfect health, but he keeps experiencing sudden drops in blood pressure and is daily on the verge of fainting. Duran's pathological persistence has caused Dr, Miranda to forbid him even to enter the hospital, but as his e-mails become increasingly desperate, Dr. Miranda's secretary, Karina, decides to have mercy on him and secretly impersonates the doctor to write a kind reply.
"Why do we find it so hard to accept that life is pure chance?" this short novel asks repeatedly, as its complex, deeply compassionate dual narratives--both revolving around lying to give someone false comfort--create a web of needy, passionate people who could be saved by the redemptive power of words... if they'll only talk to each other. Barrera Tyszka's characters are good people, flawed and conflicted, lying and facing their fears, trying to do the right thing. You grow to care for them enough that you want to know more than the hints with which The Sickness ends its powerful meditation on mortality and the interrelatedness of our lives. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: A good doctor struggles to tell his beloved father that he has terminal cancer in a novel that won the Premio Herralde award for Spanish-language literature upon its original publication.