The Cure

De: John Fraser

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The Cure consists of two novellas with the related theme of malady and cure. What is a cure for? An ailment, an affliction - the succession and inevitability of them? Cures seem to be directed at the body, but we manage them with our minds, and sometimes we seek a cure for what's been done to us, or what we've done. The son in this tale needs a cure for his father - his parent's sickness, his unavoidable death, the genes, the sex, the burden of the past, his heritage. He breaks horses, writes about it, meets up with a swinging gangster, Emily. She excels at everything, and her ambition is to rule a small country, to be its horse-cure, as it were. Troubles abound, favours are requested - many cures for many conditions are tried and create further dysfunctions. The short piece 'Seals' takes the reader through encounters with the peoples of the world, their infirmities, remedies, placebos and sufferings of a malady that appears universal. The conclusion hints at a therapy.

John Fraser lives near Rome. Previously, he worked in England and Canada. Of Fraser's fiction the Whitbread Award winning poet John Fuller has written: 'One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature œuvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus's forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs.'

;therapy