Your Illness will be my teacher
(Tu enfermedad será mi maestro)
2024
A man in his forties watches his mother decline due to a rapid onset of Alzheimer’s disease. This experience, along with that of other loved ones suffering from altered states of consciousness and near-death experiences, prompts him to fundamentally question the workings of the human mind and the mechanisms behind delusions, forgetfulness, and hallucinations. His reflections, supported by dedicated readings—primarily of Oliver Sacks but also of Carlos Castaneda and other explorers of the human brain—result in a story that is as unusual as it is fascinating, a personal quest at the intersection of science, fiction, and various forms of reality. In this novel, Cristian Geisse employs a fast-paced and often comedic writing style to portray indelible characters and episodes. Tu enfermedad será mi maestro reaffirms his status as one of the most unique and unpredictable storytellers in contemporary Chilean literature.
Critics
"Geisse navigates through hallucinogenic worlds, in a journey that lightens the dramatic weight of a story that is in itself very painful — how to face the aging and death of one's parents — without taking away from the tenderness of this son, who decides to learn something from the inevitable collapse."
— Lorena Amaro, Palabra Pública
"With Your Illness Will Be My Teacher, the wonderful book by Geisse [...], convinced that I was entering a novel about Alzheimer’s, I suddenly realized, while reading, that I had entered a diary about the deterioration of a woman, but also a chronicle of the COVID-19 pandemic that, however, contained within it an essay on the limits of consciousness and the boundaries between reality and fiction, in addition to a letter to the sick mother that is, in fact, a letter from Geisse the writer to Geisse the reader, as well as a space where daydreams pretend to be everyday life and everyday life is assumed to be daydream."
— Emiliano Monge, El País
"[…] what we find in his literary art is a vast world, full of imagination and capable of exploring the dark corners of human psychology."
— Martín Parra Olave, Cine y Literatura
Rigts sold
• Spanish (World): Penguin Random House