Jean-Michel Guenassia is a new name in European prose. Russian readers became acquainted with this author when his first big book, “The Club of Incorrigible Optimists,” was published. French critics called it a great novel, and French lyceum students awarded the author the Goncourt Prize. For the first time in Russian, the writer’s second book is “The Amazing Life of Ernesto Che.” The protagonist of this tale, which spans nearly a century, is a doctor named Josef. It’s just that he was left terminally ill for a century. And although the young doctor, whom the vicissitudes of fate throw to Algeria, manages to treat local peasants and even fight the plague epidemic, he turns out to be powerless when faced with the brown plague that bled Europe, and later, upon returning to his homeland, in socialist Czechoslovakia, in the atmosphere general surveillance and suspicion. The only thing that seems to resist corrosion in this environment is love. But fate confronts Joseph with a mysterious patient, a Latino named Ramon. Which of them will be able to survive the fight with the system?..