A LIBRARY OF WEIRD AILMENTS
What a strange and compelling book this is! It conjures an easy comparison with Jorge Luis Borges—especially since one of the epigraphs is from the Argentine master’s The Library of Babel—but that doesn’t begin to explain its effect. Using a very short framing story about a man named Maximo being shown around the Central Library in an unspecified time and place (the setting and the writing style appear medieval), the bulk of Paralkar’s book simply chronicles some of the ailments recorded in the precious Encyclopaedia Medicinae.
Grotesque and mystical, these are fictitious afflictions—or are they? Some are clearly otherworldly. In ‘Osteitis deformans preciosa’, the invalid’s bones keep folding back on themselves, even beyond death, until a year later a whole skeleton has been reduced to a concentrated, eyeball-sized diamond. But others are more plausible, with echoes in the human condition as we know it: blank spots in the mind, so that only fragments of certain incidents can be remembered; a disease called “Morbus geographicus”, where the patient must detach himself from each place where he has just settled down, and travel to new pastures for healing. Readers familiar with the medical writings of Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) or V.S. Ramachandran (Phantoms in the
Brain) may be reminded of the more unusual neurological cases discussed in those books.
Each entry is accompanied by a simple, yet resonant, illustration by Pia Valentinis, and the writing style is deliberately impassive. Though there is some theological speculation: could Cursed Healer Syndrome, in which the sufferer takes on the disfigurements of people around him, be “a gift from the Lord”, a version of Christ suffering for others’ sins?
“If you read the Encyclopaedia from beginning to end,” the head librarian says, “you get the feeling that every affliction known to man is part of a single, infinite progression.”
The book is a commentary on the multipronged relationship between our bodies and minds, something that even today’s science is incapable of revealing too much about. There are reflections on the nature of memory and the creation of art: one disease causes the ears of illiterate peasants to ring with notes from a sophisticated musical composition; another gives its victims such powerful visions that they are driven to express them through books or paintings, but produce only mediocre work.
And, occasionally, it reads like a straightforward anthropological observation. Individuals with ‘Empathia pathologica’, we are told, develop a crippling susceptibility to the moods of others: “It is only in absolute seclusion, far from all human contact, that they can be certain they are savouring joys or sorrows that are truly their own.”
Vikram Paralkar’s compelling new novel is a chronicle of grotesque and mystical medical conditions