The Afflictions

by Vikram Paralkar

Overview

The legendary Encyclopedia of Medicine is a dizzying collection of maladies: an amnesia that causes everyone you've ever met to forget you exist, while you remain perfectly, painfully aware of your history. A wound that grows with each dark thought or evil deed you commit but shrinks with every act of kindness. A disease that causes your body to imitate death, stopping your heart, cooling your blood. Will the fit pass before they bury you—or after?

The Afflictions is a magical compendium of pseudo-diseases, an encyclopedia of archaic medicine written by a contemporary physician and scientist. Little by little, these bizarre and mystical afflictions frame an eternal struggle: between human desire and the limits of bodily existence.

First published in English in the United States, The Afflictions has since been published in Argentina, Italy, and India. This second U.S. edition features the original illustrations created by Pia Valentinis for the Italian language edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941360354
Publisher:	Lanternfish Press
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	869,538
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

Vikram Paralkar was born and raised in Mumbai. Author of two works of fiction, The Afflictions and Night Theater, he is a physician-scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, where he treats patients with leukemia and researches the disease. His works have been translated into several foreign languages.

Editorial Reviews

Paralkar’s prose is sharp and melodious, and within these enchanting passages is a haunting contemplation of life, death, the liminal space in between, and the dogged search for resurrection… A beguiling and unforgettable fable.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred)

From the Publisher

2015-01-08
An archaic world struggles with strange maladies in this darkly whimsical meditation on human discontents. In a quasi-medieval land where science is still subordinate to church metaphysics, Senhor José, the monkish Head Librarian at the Central Library, introduces an apothecary named Máximo to the collection's greatest treasure: the Encyclopaedia Medicinae. Perusing it, they discover short treatises on improbable ailments that combine physical disease with mental anguish, social antagonism and spiritual malaise. These include a reverse amnesia that causes everyone you know to forget who you are; a skin ulceration that expands with sinful behavior and shrinks with good deeds; a toxin that causes people to perceive the unbearable truth about the world; an infection that causes peasants and aristocrats to talk like each other; a hallucinatory fever that compels sufferers to create mediocre art; a collective ailment that causes groups of five people to share a single consciousness; and a syndrome that makes corpses return to life—a phenomenon that threatens "to topple the magnificent edifice of philosophy, art and literature" by undermining faith in the finality of death. Paralkar, a hematologist and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, sketches these mythical misfortunes in brief, elegant entries written as if by a physician-philosopher, setting out the preposterous specifics of symptoms, diagnoses and treatments beside mock scholarly debates over etiology and final ruminations on existential import. One school of thought characterizes membrum vestigiale, a wing growing out of the shoulder blade, as "a disease of truncated ambitions…of some yearning within man to escape limits nature places on him." There's no plot here and really nothing to this slight book except feuilletons, but Paralkar's tragicomic imagination, sly sendup of pseudo-Latinate medical prose and fine sense of irony make for an arresting read. A haunting take on the ills of flesh and soul.

Kirkus Reviews