Picture of author.

Alberto Barrera Tyszka

Autor(a) de The Sickness

19 Works 192 Membros 11 Críticas

About the Author

Image credit: Venezuelan author Alberto Barrera Tyszka during Chacao's Book Fair in Caracas, Venezuela, 2011. Photo by Guillermo Ramos Flamerich

Obras por Alberto Barrera Tyszka

The Sickness (2006) 97 exemplares
Patria o muerte (2015) 40 exemplares
Crímenes (2009) 6 exemplares
Alta Traición (2008) 3 exemplares
Die letzten Tage des Comandante (2016) 3 exemplares
Blue Label 2 exemplares
CRIMENES (NH) (2010) 2 exemplares
RATING (NH) (2013) 2 exemplares
La Correspondance des Autres (2013) 1 exemplar
Rating (2011) 1 exemplar
Bogotá contada 2.0 (2015) 1 exemplar

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento
1960
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
Venezuela
Local de nascimento
Caracas, Venezuela
Ocupações
journalist

Membros

Críticas

Ernesto Durán sabe que está enfermo. Aunque los resultados clínicos digan lo contrario, desde que se ha separado de su mujer y vive solo, padece todos los síntomas de un mal que, según sospecha, puede ser mortal. Su obsesión va más allá de la mera hipocondría, y tiene la certeza de que sólo hay un médico que puede salvarlo. Pero el elegido, el doctor Javier Miranda, en esos mismos momentos se enfrenta a una tragedia personal: un diagnóstico irrefutable que señala que su padre tiene cáncer, y le quedan pocas semanas por vivir. Mientras Durán necesita desesperadamente hablar de su caso y de él mismo, el doctor Miranda se siente rehén del silencio, es incapaz de hacer con su padre lo que siempre ha hecho con sus pacientes: decir la verdad. La vivencia de la enfermedad en estas dos personas que ocupan posiciones tan distintas, el médico que sabe acerca de la vida y de la muerte y no quiere o no puede hablar, y el enfermo de angustia que sólo sabe que su sufrimiento no le deja vivir, es la columna vertebral que sostiene a esta hermosa novela, madura, adulta, reflexiva y refinada, que nos susurra desde su primera página algo que está en nuestra naturaleza: vivir mata.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
Natt90 | 6 outras críticas | Jul 20, 2022 |
¿Hasta dónde está dispuesta a llegar la televisión en su desesperada búsqueda de audiencia? Esta pregunta parece respirar en todas las páginas de esta historia. Rating es una novela que explora los límites morales en el crudo mundo de los reality shows y que hurga, desde su interior, en la exitosa industria de la telenovela latinoamericana. La novela alterna, hasta fusionarlas, la voz de Manuel Izquierdo, un guionista en plena crisis de los cincuenta, que después de dos décadas escribiendo melodramas televisivos se ha vuelto cínico y descreído, con la de Pablo Manzanares, un estudiante de literatura que quiere ser poeta y ha conseguido un trabajo menor en un canal. Desde las palabras de estos dos personajes, de estas dos experiencias que se cruzan, Barrera Tyszka propone un relato que desarrolla una sola historia y termina construyendo una única voz, apostando incluso por la creación de una sintaxis que reproduce el efecto caótico de la retórica televisiva.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
Natt90 | Jul 12, 2022 |
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.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
Michael.Rimmer | 6 outras críticas | Jul 18, 2021 |
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...
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
thorold | Mar 2, 2020 |

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Associated Authors

Matthias Strobel Translator
Hendrik Hutter Translator

Estatísticas

Obras
19
Membros
192
Popularidade
#113,797
Avaliação
½ 3.7
Críticas
11
ISBN
50
Línguas
6

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