Download The Diagnosis AudioBook Free
Alan Lightman's first novel, Einstein's Dreams, was greeted with international praise. Salman Rushdie called it "at once intellectually provocative and touching and comic and so very beautifully written." Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that the novel creates "a magical, metaphysical realm . . . as in Calvino's work, the fantastical components of the stories are grounded in precise, crystalline prose." With The Diagnosis, Lightman gives us his most ambitious and penetrating novel yet.
While rushing to his office one warm summer morning, Bill Chalmers, a junior executive, realizes that he cannot remember where he's going or even who he's. All he remembers is the motto of his company: The utmost information in the minimum time.
When Bill's memory returns, "his head pounding, remembering too much," a strange numbness afflicts him, beginning as a tingling in his hands and slowly but surely spreading over the others of his body. As he attempts to discover a diagnosis of his illness, he descends into a nightmare, enduring a blizzard of medical tests and specialists without conclusive results, the manic frenzy of his company, and a desperate wife who decides that he must be imagining his deteriorating condition.
By turns satiric, comic, and tragic, The Diagnosis is an excellent and disturbing examination of our modern obsession with speed, information, and money, and what this obsession has done to your minds and our spirits.
