Father and Son

February 2, 2015
Torrente's tiresome tiradeâalthough it won the Spanish National Book Award, only Wimmer's elegant translation saves the English editionâjoins the long line of muddled memoirs of regretful sons groping to find themselves in the reflections of their father's life. Torrente and his artist father find very little common ground in lives filled with bitterness, regret, misplaced hopes, and resentment. In staccato prose, Torrente chronicles in minute detail the days of his life from 1984-2002, and the ways that his father moves in and out of those days like a ghost haunting the backdrop of his life. Through a litany of events in his father's life, we learn that "he had a tendency to gain weight he smoked for a while he was humble with the meek and contemptuous with the arrogant he was impatient and often committed injustices in speaking to a waiter or concluding a conversation." Unsurprisingly, Torrente grows more introspective and tries to sort out his already bewildering relationship with his father when his father is diagnosed with cancer in 2007: "Is he following my lead or am I following his? Is he setting the pace or am I paving the way for his surrender with my own." In the end, neither inspires much sympathy in this oft-told tale of father-son dysfunction, and Torrente concludes unremarkably, "we matter only as much as we come to believe that we matter."

Starred review from August 1, 2014
A provocative memoir about coming to terms with not only the life and death of the author's father, but also with writing about it as honestly as possible. A prizewinning novelist in his native Spain, Torrente (The End of Love, 2013, etc.) has drawn from his own life in his fiction, and he admits that he used his writing as a "weapon" against the father who left his mother for another woman and whose contact with his son was infrequent for decades. "Triangulation, concealment, exaggeration, cross-contamination....The fact is that I used my father," he writes. "The substance of the book grew out of our deepest misunderstandings." However, he continues, "[f]iction, even when it's inspired by reality, obeys its own rules. It alters reality by pursuing different ends than those of fidelity to the truth." This, then, is a book about discovery, of new rules, of a different, more authentic voice than the one in the fiction. It's also a book about how the relationship between father and son came full circle, with the former's failing health and the latter assuming the role of primary caretaker. And it's a book about the creative process-the father was a painter who experienced shifts in critical reception as his son's career was on the rise-about blood ties and competition, and inevitably about the contemplation of one's own mortality. "The dead leave sadness and not a few questions behind them," writes Torrente. "They oblige us to contemplate our own death, and, at the same time, the futility of life, but in the face of the inarguable reality that everything comes to an end, that there's no redemption, that what wasn't done can no longer be done, our understanding fails us." Unsentimental and unflinching, the book is also about a son's love for his father and about the time lost to tension and estrangement that he wishes he had back. A short memoir that moves readers on multiple levels.

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September 1, 2014
Any memoir to be published this decade about the trying relationship between a father and son can't escape comparison to Karl Ove Knausgaard's recent, much-publicized, six-volume My Struggle. But where Knausgaard's prose meanders into endless tangents, Torrente draws concise, searing snapshots from his personal and professional life, delivering an earnest account of his father's diagnosis with cancer and eventual death. When his father, a serial philanderer and painter of fluctuating popularity, leaves the family for a woman referred to only as the friend he met in Brazil, Torrente must confront his own frustration as a struggling artist but also the guilt he soon feels at killing off a father figure in his fledgling novel. In swift, compelling paragraphs, this slim volume accomplishes what autobiography often cannot: an intimate portrait of two individuals, infused with a solemnity and candor that echoes fellow Spanish writers Andr's Neuman and Javier Marias. Together with the recent publication of a story collection (The End of Love, 2013), and his first novel (Paris, 2014), this debut memoir solidifies Torrente's multitalented arrival onto the U.S. literary scene.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)