The Afflictions (English, Paperback, Vikram Paralkar)

Shadowing an elderly librarian on his first day at the great Central Library, Máximo is thrilled to get a peek at the exclusive Encyclopedia of Medicine. It’s 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?

As Máximo soon discovers, medicine at the Central Library may be more than he bargained for.

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.

Reviews:
“Paralkar…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…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

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