Welcome

A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

To read about movies and TV shows I'm watching, visit my other blog: Elliot's Watching

Monday, September 2, 2013

Series of Dreams - in Patricio Pron's novel

The narrator seems to "wake up" in part 4 of Patricio Pron's novel My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain, as he begins to understand why his father collected so much material on the disappearance, death, murder of a man in a remote town - and what his father planned to do with this material. He suspects: write a novel. And we suspect: Pron/the narrator has taken on this task and created from the left-behind fragments the novel that we are reading. At the end of Part 3, the narrator becomes suddenly ill while visiting a museum (?) and goes home - actually, to his parents' home, where he endures a series of bizarre dreams. He wakes in part 4 and has a brief conversation with his mother and sister (?), wondering how long he was asleep, what time of day it is - a familiar passage to anyone who's recovered from a bout with flu or other debilitating illness. Not sure how Pron will wrap this up - but it remains an intriguing and puzzling novel with, oddly, both a very intense focus on a single event and with a great deal of material about the narrator, his family, a brutal killing, and a social context - set against the background of the brutal Argentine regime of the 1970s that killed left-wing activists and terrorized the country.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.