The Sickness Called Man - Hardcover

Camon, Ferdinando

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 091039590X ISBN 13: 9780910395908

Publisher: Marlboro Press, 1993

Synopsis

Ostensibly a satirical look at psychoanalysis and its practitioners, this novel is also a serious social critique of modern man.

Camon's narrator consults a series of therapists, searching for the source of his mysterious maladies. Camon draws parallels between his narrator's experiences and the experiences of Man in a morally disintegrating Italy. From his depcitions of pompous therapists to his analysis of the intersection of church and state, Camon's wit and wisdom shine.

About this title

About the Author

Ferdinando Camon (born in Montagnana 1935) is a contemporary Italian writer. He is married to a journalist and has two sons: Alessandro Camon, a film producer/writer who lives in Los Angeles, and Alberto, who teaches criminal procedure and lives in Bologna. He has contributed to a number of Italian and foreign daily newspapers, including La Stampa, l'Unità, Avvenire, Le Monde and La Nación. Perhaps Camon's best known work in English is his trilogy of fictional memoirs consisting of The Fifth Estate (Il Quinto Stato), Life Everlasting (La Vita Eterna), and Memorial (Un altare per la madre).

Reviews

At first this solipsistic Italian novel seems like a sendup of analysis and analysands, with details of the therapeutic process magnified as in a hallucinatory comedy. Camon ( The Fifth Estate ), however, has a solemn agenda. The first-person narrator describes his experiences with various therapists, from the pompous to the gifted, all of whom he consulted in an effort to understand his mysterious maladies. Along the way Camon dissects the etiquette of analysis, discourses on analytic silence, interprets a series of dreams, etc., but his observations become secondary to his social critique. Man is the corpus delicti. "Analysis is history on trial," he argues, concluding that we are all orphans: "I'd lost the Mother Church, I didn't have a Father political Party." But Camon's protagonist is far from a universal figure--for example, he represents feminist advances as the losses of males--and the leap from his individual psyche to the so-called modern condition is improbable at best.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Marlboro Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 091039590X
• ISBN 13: 9780910395908
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 177