Book
1 of 1 Copy Available
- CENTRAL: First Floor Collection
The mutations
Call Number
- FICTION COME (CEN)
Edition
First American edition.
Languages
Translated from the Spanish.
Publication Information
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
Physical Description
184 pages ; 20 cm
Uniform Title
Summary
Ramon Martinez is a militant atheist, successful lawyer, and conventional family man. But all of that changes when his privileged life disintegrates after cancer of the tongue deprives him of the source of his power and livelihood: speech. Jorge Comensal's The Mutations is a comedy tracing the metastasis of Ramon's cancer through his body and through the lives of his family members, colleagues, and doctors, dissecting the experience of illness and mapping the relationships both strengthened and frayed in its wake. Mateo and Paulina, his teenage children, struggle with the temptations of masturbation and binge-eating, respectively. Ramon's melancholic oncologist is haunted by the memory of a young patient whom he was unable to save. His selfish pathologist believes Ramon's tumor holds the key to a major scientific breakthrough. And then Elodia, Ramon's pious maid, brings him a foul-mouthed parrot as a birthday gift, and this filthy bird becomes Ramon's companion, confidant, and unlikely double.
Notes
"Originally published in Spanish in 2016 by Ediciones Antílope, Mexico, as Las mutaciones"--Title page verso.