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    The Diagnosis: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Diagnosis: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Diagnosis: A Novel
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Diagnosis: A Novel

    Written by Alan Lightman

    Narrated by Scott Brick

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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 elements 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 is going or even who he is. All he remembers is the motto of his company: The maximum 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 gradually spreading over the rest of his body. As he attempts to find 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 a brilliant and disturbing examination of our modern obsession with speed, information, and money, and what this obsession has done to our minds and our spirits.

    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateNov 8, 2000
    ISBN9781415910870
    Unavailable
    The Diagnosis: A Novel
    Author

    Alan Lightman

    Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. He was educated at Princeton University and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in theoretical physics. Lightman is the author of five novels, including the international bestseller Einstein’s Dreams, two collections of essays, a book-­length narrative poem, and several books on science. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. 

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    Reviews for The Diagnosis

    3/5

    105 ratings4 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Boring, disappointing, plodding.
    • 4/5
      Maybe a cross between Franz Kafka and Peter Kingsley. Bill is a wheeler-dealer high finance guy. We watch him collapse physically to a profound degree. Nobody can figure out what the cause is. LIghtman doesn't really explain it... there are a couple breadcrumbs but they don't really form a trail. But we see what a hollow shell of a life our hero actually has. He's a kind of upper middle class everyman. Our whole society is a hollow shell. Then we have a parallel story inside the story, the death of Socrates. Yeah, killing of Socrates could well be down at the root of the hollowness of our society. Bill starts to find beauty in the interstices. There's hope at the heart of the hollowness.
    • 2/5
      I read this after having loved "Einstein's Dreams" for years. This did not live up to my hopes at all. The story was intriguing at first and as always Lightman's descriptive skills are pretty impressive but the story got rather mind numbing as it went along. My biggest issue with it however was his use of emails as part of the storyline. The email text and misspellings (though I understand they were part of the point he was making) were infuriating to try and read and I eventually gave up.
    • 2/5
      This books starts well, but drags as it goes along. I love the descriptions and satires of corporate life in metro-Boston. The email dialogue complete with misspellings is annoying. The scene with the debilitated father and anxious son is very close to the heart for me.