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Friday, August 30, 2013

A novel in fragments, and an odd title: My Fathers' Ghost [ yes, plural possessive] Is Climbing in the Rain

Made a mistake in reporting title of Patricio Pron's novel that I'm reading: It's actually My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain. Yes, plural possessive; I thought that might have been a publisher's mistake (thought the same about the "missing" enumerated sections in this novel), but, no, the Spanish reads "mes padres." So what to make of this? The odd narrator has multiple fathers, but they share a single ghost, or "spirit" in an alternate translation, The novel continues to be very odd and strangely captivating. Ater narrator visits father in the hospital, he goes back to the family home and rummages among his father's papers, where he finds some newspaper clippings and his father's notations. The clippings and notes concern a man who has gone missing from a small city, El Trebol (?), i.e., The Clover, in the far north of Argentina. The novel then goes into a second section, which focuses largely on documents about this missing man and the search for him: the man seems unremarkable, a pathetic Faulknerian character the narrator calls him, for no clear reason. We don't know why he's disappeared nor why his disappearance is so stirring in this community, as it's not clear at all whether there was any "foul play." Pron has a lot of fun with the newspaper clippings, with their misspellings and clumsy use of police jargon. Not sure at all where this is going - except that the narrator has an odd, perhaps autistic capacity to focus intently on peripheral subjects and to tell surprisingly little about what would normally be the main topic of the novel - the members of the family, the background of the narrator, the father's mortal illness. The use of short sections, many of the documentary (i.e., supposed newspaper clippings of found lists scribbled by the father) is a nod to another great South American novelist, Roberto Bolano; and the shifting focus of the story, from Germany, to Argentina, to a city in the north, to a small town even farther north, somehow reminds of of Pamuk, and the journeys his fiction takes us on to ever-more remote (yet by no means exotic) places, as in Snow. And isn't there an echo as well of the odd loneliness and strange journeys of Murakami's narrators? I can't actually grasp Fathers' Ghost yet, but find it compelling and mysterious, and am hopeful that Pron can build toward something and not let us, or the novel, wander away.

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