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Praise for Night Theater
“Night Theater is astonishing—stark and luminous, nimble and tensile, powerful and propulsive in the moment, but also full of lingering wonder.”
—LEAH HAGER COHEN, author of Strangers and Cousins
“Yes, Night Theater is an exquisite fable about what we need and what we want, and a beautiful meditation on what it means to be alive. But it reads like an urgent thriller, full of characters pumping with blood and guts, twisting and turning and twisting again. This novel actually kept me up all night and then some, clutching my mortality, listening to my heartbeat, drawing that line between the living and the dead until it blurred.”
—AJA GABEL, author of The Ensemble
“Magic realism is a difficult genre to pull off but Paralkar has managed to do so with aplomb.”
—RACHNA CHHABRIA, Deccan Chronicle
“A book that delivers one hundred per cent in terms of thrill, drama, atmosphere and eeriness.”
—IVINDER GILL, Financial Express
“Equal parts speculative fiction, medical drama and a philosophical treatise on death . . . Perceptive and absurdly humorous in ways I hadn’t expected. By the time I reached its smashing final line, I was hoping Paralkar would resurrect the dead for a sequel.”
—KARTHIK SHANKAR, The Hindu
“A beautifully fearsome meta-fiction on death, the dead and the living.”
—JINOY JOSE P, BusinessLine
Praise for The Afflictions
“Disease is made into something new and strange through the eyes of writer-scientist Vikram Paralkar . . . Paralkar shares with Borges a collector’s delight in details.”
—BRENDA WANG, The Believer
“The beauty of The Afflictions comes from the fact that it is an unabashedly entertaining narrative that revels in weirdness and impossibility while also packing a much more profound layer in which Paralkar explores the frailty, failures, and absurdity of human nature . . . Vikram Paralkar is a talented author with a knack for the fantastic. He knows medicine, but it’s his understanding of the relationship between diseases and the human mind and spirit that make The Afflictions a great read.”
—GABINO IGLESIAS, Atticus Review
“Paralkar’s tragicomic imagination, sly sendup of pseudo-Latinate medical prose and fine sense of irony make for an arresting read . . . A haunting take on the ills of flesh and soul.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Marks the birth of a fiction writer who must be followed closely.”
—SELVA FLORENCE MANZUR, Uno
“The whole book has a deeply Borgesian air.”
—MERCEDES HALFON, Página/12
“Beautifully narrated, with Pythagorean prose . . . Borgesian in style. The sentences are polished till they gleam . . . The Afflictions is not only the delicious fruit (hilarious at times) of an overflowing imagination, but is also filled with erudition. Paralkar trades in philosophy, history, anthropology and theology, among other disciplines . . . This is a book to devour with relish.”
—GUILLERMO BELCORE, La Prensa
ALSO BY VIKRAM PARALKAR
The Afflictions
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2020 by Vikram Paralkar
First published in India in 2017 as The Wounds of the Dead by
Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
First published in Great Britain in 2019 as Night Theatre by
Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
First published in the United States in 2020 by Catapult (catapult.co)
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-948226-54-7
Cover design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941064
Printed in the United States of America
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CONTENTS
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Acknowledgments
THE DAY THE DEAD visited the surgeon, the air in his clinic was laced with formaldehyde. His pharmacist had poured some into a beaker in the operating room and given it a night to scour every corner. Once the door was opened, the acrid fumes spilled into the corridor and death leached out of the walls. This was the usual death, the mundane kind—that of insects and vermin.
The previous afternoon, a farmer had slit open the forearm of another with a sickle. They rushed up the hillock and crowded into the clinic, five farmers with a red trail behind them, holding the wound shut with a grimy rag.
The surgeon peeled off the cloth and saw the laceration from elbow to wrist.
“How did this happen?”
The