Iván Thays
Fotografía de Kimba Kuzas para la carátula
Bajo el título The Sickness, la novela de Alberto Barrera Tyszka La enfermedad (ganadora del Premio Herralde 2006) ha sido traducida al inglés por McLehoss Pres. En el diario Irish Times hacen una reseña muy positiva sobre el libro.
Dice la reseña:
André Miranda is a doctor, well used to dealing with the ill and the dying. But when test results belonging to his father confirm there is no hope, the doctor becomes a son incapable of dealing with the inevitable. Instead of breaking the news, he decides to lie even though it is obvious his father already suspects the worst. Dr Miranda?s personal crisis reduces another problem; an obsessive patient is now no more than a mere irrelevance. This insistent, eloquent novel from Venezuelan writer Alberto Barrera Tyszka is a prose sonata that gracefully peels away every layer of human vulnerability. The patient, Miranda?s widower father Javier, has dealt with his life?s grief, the shocking death of his wife in a very public aircraft disaster. It left him alone with the then 10-year-old Andreas. Even at that age, the future doctor was already given to pragmatic curiosity and had discovered an interest in how the body works ? and doesn?t. The father and son have had a close relationship but when the father expects to be told the truth about his illness, his son, although so experienced in such matters, can not discuss the facts. It is movingly described and all too believable. Tyszka?s remarkable novel is poised and human; through his direct, exact prose, meticulously rendered into English by Margaret Jull Costa, one of the finest international literary translators currently at work, he succeeds in making father and son sympathetic as both grapple with death. (?) 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.
