Tomás González

What a waste of time. Gonzalez, at least in this book, had zero (or even less than zero) interest in telling you anything about his characters, much less developing them. He had a story to tell and nothing would get in the way. Every five chapters or so he would insert a single sentence meant, I presume, to be ominous about how the protagonist would die before long. Writing was okay, nothing remarkable (appears to be an excellent translation). Just a great disappointment; I had liked The Storm but this was just a waste of my time.… (mer)

3.5*

26-year old twins Mario and Jose help their father run a beach holiday complex on the Colombian coast. Their feelings towards him are conflicted. They have a faint, grudging admiration for the life he has built for himself. But what they feel is primarily anger at his casual arrogance, his overriding pride, his belittling of his sons and his ex-wife, who has descended into mental illness partly as a result of his philandering (or, at least, that’s what Mario and Jose seem to think). One morning, against all good sense and despite ominous weather warnings, the three men set out on a fishing trip. As the wind and waves gather around them, pent up emotions surface and bubble over.

Tomás González is one of Colombia’s leading contemporary novelists. Thanks to Andrea Rosenberg, English-speaking readers can now appreciate this finely-crafted novella. True, the Lear-like pathetic fallacy – a storm as a backdrop to a fiery family portrait – borders on the obvious. But the character studies are convincing and insightful. I also liked the quirky narration which alternates between a “real-time” diary of the fateful fishing trip and multiple first-person accounts from the point of view of the people who follow the events from the safety of the Caribbean coast : the estranged wife, the father’s new partner, children playing on the beach, guests at the holiday complex. All this plays out against a lovingly-drawn natural setting, with the awe-inspiring beauty – and violence – of the ocean recalling Romantic notions of the Sublime.… (mer)

"I slept almost four hours straight, dreamlessly, until I was awakened at seven by the knot of grief in my belly at the death of my son Jacobo, which we’d scheduled for seven that night, Portland time, ten o’clock in New York."

By the time the first very short chapter (there are 33 of them and the first is the shortest) closes with this sentence, we know that the narrator, David, is in New York and not in Portland and we know that most of the family is there with him while Jacobo and his brother Pablo are making their way to Portland. So why is Jacobo scheduled to die, why is it happening away from home and why is the family not with him?

Instead of relying on alternating chapters, Tomás González uses alternating paragraphs in most of his chapters to jump around the timeline. The here and now is a small Colombian village, La Mesa de Juan Díaz, in 2018. But that time shares the spotlight with New York in 1999 on the day his son died and we get glimpses of other times in David's life.

In 2018, David is a widower, living alone and employing a local family to help him after having lost his wife Sara 2 years earlier and now slowly starting to loose his eyesight. He still gets visitors and his sons and friends call often but he is nevertheless alone. In 1999, he was a successful painter, with a loving wife, 3 sons and a circle of friends.

Unable to paint anymore due to the damage to his eyes, the old man takes to writing and starts a memoir. What we read is a mix between the memoir and his current thoughts, without separators and without indication of which part belongs to what. It feels a bit disjointed at first but when the rhythm settles, it starts feeling like the thought of a man in his later years - now he thinks about his housekeeper, now he is back in time with his dead wife.

It is a story of grief and loss - the grief of losing a child, the grief of losing a wife, the grief of losing your eyesight when you had made beauty and the visual arts your life. David's voice is melancholic and as he is telling the story of the life he lived, he is able to see and appreciate the things he could have done better. But under it all runs the inevitable - Jacobo always dies, Sara can never come back and even the doctors are surprised with the rapid loss of his eyesight. And yet, it never feels hopeless and part of it is David's attitude to life and its surprises, all the way to that last sentence which he cannot even write himself anymore and needs someone else to write and yet it summarizes his life: "Wunderful!" (creative spelling fully intended - read the novella/short novel to learn why).… (mer)

3.5*

26-year old twins Mario and Jose help their father run a beach holiday complex on the Colombian coast. Their feelings towards him are conflicted. They have a faint, grudging admiration for the life he has built for himself. But what they feel is primarily anger at his casual arrogance, his overriding pride, his belittling of his sons and his ex-wife, who has descended into mental illness partly as a result of his philandering (or, at least, that’s what Mario and Jose seem to think). One morning, against all good sense and despite ominous weather warnings, the three men set out on a fishing trip. As the wind and waves gather around them, pent up emotions surface and bubble over.

Tomás González is one of Colombia’s leading contemporary novelists. Thanks to Andrea Rosenberg, English-speaking readers can now appreciate this finely-crafted novella. True, the Lear-like pathetic fallacy – a storm as a backdrop to a fiery family portrait – borders on the obvious. But the character studies are convincing and insightful. I also liked the quirky narration which alternates between a “real-time” diary of the fateful fishing trip and multiple first-person accounts from the point of view of the people who follow the events from the safety of the Caribbean coast : the estranged wife, the father’s new partner, children playing on the beach, guests at the holiday complex. All this plays out against a lovingly-drawn natural setting, with the awe-inspiring beauty – and violence – of the ocean recalling Romantic notions of the Sublime.… (mer)