Exploring sanity and insanity, truth and untruth, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’ s Disease is Svetislav Basara’ s unblinking and unforgettable deconstruction of the Soviet psyche.
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.
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. In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’ s Disease, 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.
