Father and Son ― A Lifetime

In a startling English-language debut, one of Spain’s foremost writers asks: How can you write about those who mean the most to you?

Many authors have wrestled with the death of a father in their writing, but few have grappled so fiercely or as powerfully as the brilliant Spanish writer Marcos Giralt Torrente does in Father and Son, the mesmerizing and discomfiting memoir that won him Spain’s highest literary award, the National Book Award. Giralt Torrente is best known for his fiction—which has only recently begun to appear in translation in the United States—but it is in this often savage memoir that his full gifts explode.
When his father is diagnosed with cancer, the author is struck by the blunt force of it all. Father and Son weaves in history and personal narrative to attempt to do justice to a relationship that the author finds difficult to reflect upon—but one that he can’t escape. In the end, the reader is left with an account that is neither homage nor reckoning, but instead an indelible dual portrait of a father and his son.
When McSweeney’s published The End of Love, the reviewer for Booklist wrote: “Torrente propels characters through time, jumping hours, weeks, and years (covering, at one point, decades in a single clause), building tension with Roberto Bolano–like accumulation of plot . . . This is Torrente’s first book to appear in English. With luck, the first of many.”
Father and Son is an uncommonly gripping memoir by an uncommonly talented international writer.