The Sickness

March 5, 2012
Dr. Andrés Miranda, a well-known advocate of "the transparent relationship between doctor and patient," has trouble following his own advice when his father is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Edifying digressions addressing economic injustice and the plight of women in a society dominated by machismo culture, as well as lengthy medical anecdotes, feel somehow forced, as though Tyszka (Hugo Chàvez) wanted to give the reader a little respite from the predictably voracious advance of the terminal illness, or Miranda's own oddly disassociated emotions when confronted with his rapidly deteriorating father. The novel gathers steam when Miranda's secretary decides to respond to the desperate e-mails of a hypochondriac, an ex-patient who has been stalking her boss, in order to avert a possible catastrophe. This parallel plot evolves into an engrossing dialectic, and is possessed of all the dramatic portent and subtle character development that are strangely absent from the main storyline.

February 15, 2012
Tyszka's novel does not belabor the moral ambiguities of illness but draws them with clean, scalpel-sharp precision. After all, he knows it's not necessary to overstate the impact of a parent's fatal illness on a grown son. In this case, the son is Andres Miranda, a Venezuelan physician, whose profession only serves to complicate his ability to deal with his father's impending death. For instance, he's always subscribed to the Band-Aid theory of bad-news delivery to his patients. Tell them the hard facts outright. Get it over with. Yet, even as he postpones reading his father's medical reports, he ponders whether that's the best practice as far as the old man is concerned. The theme of truth-telling is repeated in a subplot involving Andres' secretary and one of his former patients, the hypochondriacal Ernesto Duran, who is obsessed with Dr. Miranda. Tyszka is transparent as a storyteller, allowing the starkness of a situation to speak for itself. Margaret Jull Costa's translation is lean, clean, and potent.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)