Retrospective
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
"One of the great novels to have been written in our language" MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
"Beautifully written and gripping" Guardian
He thought that memories were invisible like light, and just as smoke made light show, there must be a way for memories to be seen...
In October 2016, the real-life Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera is attending a retrospective of his films in Barcelona. It's a difficult time for him: his father, Fausto Cabrera, has just died; his marriage is in crisis; and his country has rejected peace agreements that might have ended more than fifty years of war.
In the course of a few turbulent and intense days, Sergio will recall the events that marked the family's life, and especially his father's, his sister Marianella's and his own.
From the Spanish Civil War to the exile of his republican family in Latin America, and from the Cultural Revolution in China to the guerrilla movements of 1960s Latin America, not only will do we discover a series of adventures extraordinary by any standards, but also a devastating portrait of the forces that for half a century turned the world upside down and created the one we now inhabit.
Retrospective is a revelatory and unforgettable novel.
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vásquez (The Shape of the Ruins) returns with a dramatic if bloated epic based on the lives of Colombian filmmaker Sergio Cabrera and his father, Fausto, an actor turned revolutionary. Days before a Catalonian retrospective honoring Sergio's films in 2016, Sergio learns of Fausto's death in Colombia. Sergio opts to stay in Spain rather than attend the funeral, and the novel travels back and forth in time, recounting the history of the Cabreras and tracking Sergio throughout the festival. Fausto, transplanted to Latin America during the Spanish Civil War, has two children in Bogotá with his wife, Luz Elena, and works as a performer and director on early Colombian television. Fausto and Luz both support FARC, the nation's revolutionary movement, and in 1961 they move the family to Maoist China, where Sergio and his sister, Marianella, join the Red Guard as children. In their late teens, the children return to Colombia to become guerrillas. Back in 2016, Sergio watches his films with his teenage son, Raúl, and tells him stories of their exploits. The narrative has its share of exciting moments amid Colombia's historical turmoil, yet Vásquez's intense attention to detail and frequent historical asides tend to bog things down. This frustrates as much as it fascinates.
