'The Sick List operates on the far side of literature.' John Schad
In this novel, an unnamed academic in an unnamed contemporary
university, relates his obsession with his tutor, Gordon. He pores over
the increasingly bizarre mis-readings in Gordon's annotations in a
strange selection of stolen library books. Is Gordon unraveling a
mystery? Or is his own mind unraveling? Meanwhile, an epidemic of
catatonia breaks out; academics are found slumped and unconscious at
their desks. Is reading itself the cause of this sickness? Is the only
escape to return to illiteracy?
Witty, moving, and beautifully written, The Sick List plays with the
dividing line between deploring and exemplifying what it most despises.
Inspired by the work of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, it
considers how the minds of educated people are moulded by both the
breadth of literary culture and the narrowness of academic institutions.
'The Sick List is about menace, about a menace (Gordon), and is
written in the voice of a menace. It reads like one of the pen-portraits
of surreal ultra-violence in Bernhard's Gargoyles, where education
turns out to be the most deceitful panacea of all.' Katharine Craik
