Death as a Side Effect

By Ana María Shua

1998

First Published

3.59

Average Rating

231

Number of Pages

7H03M

Audio Length

In Death as a Side Effect, Ana María Shua’s brilliantly dark satire transports readers to a dystopic future Argentina where gangs of ad hoc marauders and professional thieves roam the streets while the wealthy purchase security behind fortified concrete walls and the elderly cower in their apartments in fear of being whisked off to state-mandated “convalescent” homes, never to return. Abandoned by his mistress, suffocated by his father, and estranged from his demented mother and ineffectual sister, Ernesto seeks his vanished lover. Hoping to save his dying father from the ministrations of a diabolical health-care system, he discovers that, ultimately, everyone is a patient, and the instruments wielded by the impersonal medical corps cut to the very heart of the social fabric. The world of this novel, with its closed districts, unsafe travel, ubiquitous security cameras, and widespread artificiality and uncertainty, is as familiar as it is strange—and as instructive, in its harrowing way, as it is deeply entertaining. The Spanish edition has been selected by the Congreso de la Lengua Española as one of the one hundred best Latin American novels published in the last twenty-five years.

Avg Rating

3.59

Number of Ratings

148

5 STARS

18%

4 STARS

36%

3 STARS

34%

2 STARS

10%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Ana María Shua

Author · 12 books

Ana María Shua has earned a prominent place in contemporary Argentine fiction with the publication of many books in nearly every genre: novels, short stories, short short stories, poetry, children's fiction, books of humor and Jewish folklore, anthologies, film scripts, journalistic articles, and essays. Her award-winning works have been translated to many languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Islandic, Bulgarian, and Serbian, and her stories appear in anthologies throughout the world. Born in Buenos Aires in 1951, Shua began her literary career at the young age of sixteen with the publication of El sol y yo (The Sun and I), a volume of poetry which received two literary prizes in 1967. She went on to study at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires and worked as an advertising copywriter and journalist during the early stages of her career. Since then, she has received numerous national and international awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel El libro de los recuerdos(The Book of Memories, 1994). Her other novels include Soy Paciente (Patient, 1980), Los amores de Laurita (Laurita's Loves,1984), which was made into a movie, La muerte como efecto secundario (Death as a Side Effect, 1997). and El peso de la tentación (The Weight of Temptation, 2007). Her first four microfiction books have been published in Madrid in one volume: Cazadores de Letras, (Letter’s Hunters, 2009). Her complete short stories have been published as Que tengas una vida interesante (Buenos Aires, 2009). Her last microfiction book is Fenómenos de circo in 2011. She published Contra el tiempo, short-stories, in 2013