An Ideal Presence by Eduardo Berti
** This link is for U.S. orders only. If you’re located elsewhere, please write us through our contact page. Thanks!In 2015, the Argentinian novelist Eduardo Berti spent several weeks in a "medico-literary" residency at the University Hospital Centre in Rouen, France, observing and conversing with the staff and volunteers of its palliative care department. From that experience he created this series of lightly fictionalized testimonials from nurses, nursing aides, doctors, administrators, porters, volunteer musicians, and the other people who make the unit tick. The result is a distinctly intimate and often poignant portrait of sickness and care, and unflinching look at death through the eyes of the people who work with it every day-but also a profound reflection on what it means to be alive.
Early Praise for An Ideal Presence
"I loved Eduardo Berti's beautifully and carefully constructed meditation on the notion of presence at death. This book left me gasping." — Amy Fusselman, author of Idiophone & Savage Park
"An Ideal Presence is about death, yes, but more than that, it's a meditation on the complicated business of living. A funny, tender book." — Carmen Machado, award-winning author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties
"Eduardo Berti's resonant homage to caretakers offers us a rare glimpse at the small moments that fill out the days of hospitals, from the humorous and warming to the unsettling and devastating. Not a word is wasted in Berti's book, nor in Daniel Levin Becker's ideal translation." — Emma Ramadan, translator, co-owner of Riffraff, and winner of the 2021 PEN Translation Prize
"One of the most outstanding writers of his generation, Eduardo Berti has dared to explore the darkest chasms of the truth of fiction and emerge not only victorious but with a cautionary, joyful, profoundly intelligent guide for our anguished times. An Ideal Presence is mandatory reading. — Alberto Manguel, author of Curiosity and A History of Reading
** This link is for U.S. orders only. If you’re located elsewhere, please write us through our contact page. Thanks!In 2015, the Argentinian novelist Eduardo Berti spent several weeks in a "medico-literary" residency at the University Hospital Centre in Rouen, France, observing and conversing with the staff and volunteers of its palliative care department. From that experience he created this series of lightly fictionalized testimonials from nurses, nursing aides, doctors, administrators, porters, volunteer musicians, and the other people who make the unit tick. The result is a distinctly intimate and often poignant portrait of sickness and care, and unflinching look at death through the eyes of the people who work with it every day-but also a profound reflection on what it means to be alive.
Early Praise for An Ideal Presence
"I loved Eduardo Berti's beautifully and carefully constructed meditation on the notion of presence at death. This book left me gasping." — Amy Fusselman, author of Idiophone & Savage Park
"An Ideal Presence is about death, yes, but more than that, it's a meditation on the complicated business of living. A funny, tender book." — Carmen Machado, award-winning author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties
"Eduardo Berti's resonant homage to caretakers offers us a rare glimpse at the small moments that fill out the days of hospitals, from the humorous and warming to the unsettling and devastating. Not a word is wasted in Berti's book, nor in Daniel Levin Becker's ideal translation." — Emma Ramadan, translator, co-owner of Riffraff, and winner of the 2021 PEN Translation Prize
"One of the most outstanding writers of his generation, Eduardo Berti has dared to explore the darkest chasms of the truth of fiction and emerge not only victorious but with a cautionary, joyful, profoundly intelligent guide for our anguished times. An Ideal Presence is mandatory reading. — Alberto Manguel, author of Curiosity and A History of Reading
** This link is for U.S. orders only. If you’re located elsewhere, please write us through our contact page. Thanks!In 2015, the Argentinian novelist Eduardo Berti spent several weeks in a "medico-literary" residency at the University Hospital Centre in Rouen, France, observing and conversing with the staff and volunteers of its palliative care department. From that experience he created this series of lightly fictionalized testimonials from nurses, nursing aides, doctors, administrators, porters, volunteer musicians, and the other people who make the unit tick. The result is a distinctly intimate and often poignant portrait of sickness and care, and unflinching look at death through the eyes of the people who work with it every day-but also a profound reflection on what it means to be alive.
Early Praise for An Ideal Presence
"I loved Eduardo Berti's beautifully and carefully constructed meditation on the notion of presence at death. This book left me gasping." — Amy Fusselman, author of Idiophone & Savage Park
"An Ideal Presence is about death, yes, but more than that, it's a meditation on the complicated business of living. A funny, tender book." — Carmen Machado, award-winning author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties
"Eduardo Berti's resonant homage to caretakers offers us a rare glimpse at the small moments that fill out the days of hospitals, from the humorous and warming to the unsettling and devastating. Not a word is wasted in Berti's book, nor in Daniel Levin Becker's ideal translation." — Emma Ramadan, translator, co-owner of Riffraff, and winner of the 2021 PEN Translation Prize
"One of the most outstanding writers of his generation, Eduardo Berti has dared to explore the darkest chasms of the truth of fiction and emerge not only victorious but with a cautionary, joyful, profoundly intelligent guide for our anguished times. An Ideal Presence is mandatory reading. — Alberto Manguel, author of Curiosity and A History of Reading