Dr Neruda's Cure for Evil [Audio Cassette]

Rafael Yglesias (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1996

A renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Rafael Neruda is troubled by a patient's death. He investigates the circumstances and discovers that he must delve into his own unimaginably painful childhood and confront the nature of evil itself. Now, endangering both his personal and professional future, Dr. Neruda will devise the ultimate test for his cure for evil--a cure that becomes a shocking journey of eroticism, manipulation and danger. Simultaneous hardcover release from Warner. 4 cassettes.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This chilling novel--the psychological history of Dr. Rafael Neruda, an analyst who suffered inconceivable abuse as a child, and one of his patients, Gene Kenny, who committed suicide--is presented as a manuscript "sealed at the request of the author, Dr. Rafael Guillermo Neruda, M.D., until fifty years after his death." Dr. Neruda's writings tell of his retribution against "evil" which, according to Neruda, appeared in the form of two characters who plagued his patient. There is Kenny's boss, who fired him, and Kenny's daughter, a narcissistic nymphomaniac who seduced him. Misusing his power as a doctor, Neruda convinces the boss to re-enact his childhood trauma with his father, and the daughter to recreate her imagined childhood incest. In his effort to eradicate the roots of abuse, the doctor reveals himself to be the most vicious character of all. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Yglesias (Fearless; Only Children) shows great respect for the attention span of readers in an ambitious therapeutic morality tale that explores the banality of evil. In the first of the book's three sections, the narrator, psychiatrist Dr. Rafael Neruda, traces his childhood from happiness through trauma to rebirth via therapy. Yglesias does an expert turn on Neruda's disintegrating relationship with his charismatic Cuban father and his Jewish mother, who descends into insanity and incestuous abuse. (Yglesias's choice of his protagonist's given name and his parents' ethnic origins is provocative in light of his own parentage.) The second part is a case history of Gene Kenny, a patient of Neruda's, who has also suffered childhood abuse. Over the course of several years?and several hundred pages?of careful and inspired talk therapy, Neruda manages to cure Kenny of his basic neuroses. Then, in accordance with the novel's central philosophical argument, Neruda discovers that these neuroses are part of the basic equipment of life. Kenny's "cure," it turns out, has in fact hobbled him?so much so that he commits a terrible crime. Then, in the novel's third section, Neruda steps out of the protective bubble of the analytic hour and into the rubble of Kenny's life in order to discover what he did wrong and to try to make it right. Becoming a participant rather than a clinician, Neruda insinuates himself into the high-tech firm where Kenny worked. There, he discovers that the sadistically manipulative CEO and his femme fatale daughter are playing out their own incestuous psychodrama on each other and on any one who gets in their path, including Neruda. He also discovers that they're perfectly happy?that, although they are textbook cases of psychological infirmity, they are, in fact, superbly functional. In short, they're evil. But Neruda insists on seeing this in medical rather than moral terms. Whether this approach is viable provides the novel with its suspense?a suspense that is more conceptual than plot-driven. Yglesias renders his characters with remarkably exhaustive psychological depth. But it comes at a price. For all the clinical persuasiveness of the characterization, there's not a lot of drama. This, combined with prose that is merely functional, renders the novel, despite its significant intelligence and ambition, a long haul more satisfying in theory than in practice. Major ad/promo; film rights to 20th Century Fox.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Dove Entertainment Inc (June 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787110787
• ISBN-13: 978-0787110789
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,604,719 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rafael Yglesias is an American novelist and screenwriter, the son of writers Jose and Helen Yglesias. He dropped out of high school upon publication of his first novel, Hide Fox, And All After in 1972 at age 17. He is the author of nine novels, including A Happy Marriage, winner of the 2009 Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, Dr. Neruda's Cure For Evil and Fearless, which he adapted for the screen. He also wrote the screenplays for Death And The Maiden, Les Miserables, From Hell, and Dark Water. He has two sons: Matthew Yglesias, a Fellow at the Center For American Progress, public intellectual and author of Heads In The Sand; Nicholas Yglesias is a fantasy novelist who has recently completed Succession, the first of a three volume trilogy. Rafael lives in the city of his birth, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, Deep, June 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (Paperback)

I'm a psychologist, and especially enjoy books with psychological content. This book provides remarkable insight into psychoanalytic thought and human complexity and fallibility. It's interesting and a good read, actually quite exciting at some points. I loved it!

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible, incredible, incredible - but not for everyone., January 30, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (Paperback)

I'm a voracious reader with high standards, and this is one of my five favorite novels of all time. It's one of those books I can't wait to forget so I can read it again.

The fact that I'm a therapist in training may partly explain why I disagree with some other reviewers who find this book pretentious, pedantic, or silly. Neruda presents the story as a psychiatrist documenting three case histories, so the narrator mostly addresses the reader as a fellow mental heatlh professional and doesn't bother to define terms or concepts. I can see how this could alienate readers who don't have the assumed knowledge base.

However, if you're familiar with, or just interested in, psychology, this book is exquisitely pleasurable. You don't have to trudge through tiring explanations; Neruda assumes you understand the basics and doesn't hesitate to leap right into the complicated stuff. You may even find that, like me, your own beliefs and theories are challenged and expanded by Yglesias.

This book reminds me a bit of The Name of the Rose, another of my top 5 all-time greatest. Remember Eco's passages of untranslated Latin and abundant references to medieval obscurities? If, like me, you didn't major in medieval studies, you probably feel like you deserve 16 credit hours by the time you've gotten through it. I can hardly get through a page without consulting The Key to The Name of the Rose, which explains all the references.

No such key exists for Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil, but I think Neruda's book is more accessible than Eco's. If you want to learn more about psychology and you're willing to Google a lot of terminology, I think you'll be able to appreciate it. If you *do* work in mental health, I think you'll adore it.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking but ultimately shallow, April 16, 2002

By 

Romantic Anna (Bronx, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (Paperback)

The first and second divisions of the book are incredibly well written. The dialogue, settings and explanations of the genuinely awful things that occur to the main character and his patient are enthralling. The reason I can't rate this novel higher is that the final third of the book, while interesting, does not capture me as being in sync with the rest of the novel. We are supposed to believe that Dr. Neruda, a man who spent most of his life up until that point helping children who suffered tortures, would behave in a basically evil way to 'cure' two socially unredeemable characters. I can't buy it and frankly, I don't think the author was very good at describing his concept of evil.

According to this author, the likes of Hitler and Stalin weren't evil, but the two businesspeople Neruda hunts after in a chilling manner are. Strange, but true. Granted, these characters are incredibly dislikeable, and Halley in particular is the least engaging character in the book. Perhaps Yglesias' failure to make these two characters intriguing is what emotionally distanced me from the finale of the novel. I was left thinking, is the author trying to show that evil is as evil does, that there is a certain banality and randomness to true evil? If so, aren't those obvious points already?

The characters that are built up and introduced in parts 1 and 2 of the novel were fantastic and quite real. What Yglesias does to some of them in part 3 is deeply boring.