The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease

<p><strong>Exploring sanity and insanity, truth and untruth, <em>The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease</em> is Svetislav Basara’s unblinking and unforgettable deconstruction of the Soviet psyche.</strong></p> <p>Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease follows the progression of the contagion’s patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness.</p> <p>Hailed as one of Serbia’s most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara’s scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him Serbia’s prestigious NIN Award.<em> In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease</em>, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humor evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka’s novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colorful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society.</p>