Alberto Barrera Tyszka

The main focus is on the relationship between Dr. Andrés Miranda and his father, who is unaware he is dying from cancer. Andrés has always believed he should be frank with his patients about the severity of their illness, but is conflicted when it comes to talking to his father.
Alongside this is the story of Ernesto Durán, a former patient who Andrés dismissed as a hypochondriac, whose desperate emails are secretly answered by his secretary in Andrés' name.

A short novel with a hefty punch, dealing with death, mortality, deception of self and others, and the blurred boundary between deception and realism, and how we use both, wilfully or otherwise, to navigate life and impending death.… (more)

Alberto Barrera Tyszka wrote one of the first biographies of Hugo Chávez, in 2005, so it's perhaps a little bit unexpected that he chose fiction as the medium in which to write about the President's death. But it isn't a totally crazy idea: by framing the book as a novel and looking at Chávez from the point of view of a wide range of characters from different social backgrounds and with different political opinions, he can bring out the difficulty of pinning down a character who was so focussed on the projection of his own image. We follow the situation in Venezuela between the announcement in June 2011 that Chávez was being treated for cancer and his death in March 2013. Amongst others, we watch him from the point of view of a retired doctor, who sees himself as politically disengaged but becomes interested in Chávez as a suffering human being (the last thing the President wants the world to imagine him as); the doctor's very anti-revolutionary wife; two journalists, one Venezuelan and one from the US, who are both finding it very difficult to write books about Chávez; a Cuban guest-worker trying to get herself and her family out of the island for good; a middle-class woman who is mostly just concerned about getting the tenants out of her apartment; a working-class woman who has become a prisoner of her fear of street crime; three militant Chavistas from a poor barrio on the fringes of Caracas; and a couple of young children who happen to have got caught up in the middle of it all.

And, intercut between all of this, Barrera keeps turning back to the Venezuelan crowd, mostly as seen through TV reports, whose collective reaction to the President's illness has quite a different character from that of any individual. It's striking how often he needs religious language to deal with this: Chávez seems to be comparing himself to Christ almost as often as he is projecting himself as the new Simon Bolivar.

Very interesting, but perhaps too short a book really to develop all these themes — we are left rather frustrated at the end by the way none of these individual stories is resolved after the President's death. Presumably Barrera wants us to realise that the country's fate at this point is just as undecided...… (more)

My mum read this novella for her bookgroup and reported the variety of reactions to it. Some found it almost impossible to read but I think it was because the subject (a man dying of cancer) too close to the bone. I haven't had direct experience of anyone close to me dying of cancer and therefore I think I approached the book more subjectively than some, plus I think the brevity of the story prevented me from becoming too attached to any of the characters.

The plot follows a doctor who is finding it very difficult to tell his father that he (the father) is terminally ill with cancer. His struggle with relating this information is interspersed with a subplot - and one which drives the story forward and kept me turning the 150 pages - about the doctor's secretary, who begins an email correspondence with one of his patients.

I found that although I liked the succinct writing of this novella, I really wanted more information and description about everyone and everything. For instance, we get a glimpse into the hard life of the cleaner, whose son is becoming drawn into a local gang, Venezuelan politics are touched upon very lightly and an incident on a boat is narrated sparsely with little context or follow through...it all left me feeling not exactly unsatisfied, but sort of emotionally uninvolved somehow. Still, an interesting read.… (more)