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.
