If a few days ago we brought you the best nine novels about motherhood, today it is time to do the honors to the parent. Both figures are notorious but they show very different nuances, and in the selection of literary parents I bring, the authoritarian and the absent stand out. Be careful, this does not bear any parallels with reality: they are simply literary resources that bring strength to the narrative or that, in some cases, they are part of the author's complicated past. We start
'The map and the territory', by Michelle Houellebecq
Houellebecq, that enfant terrible of current literature, here he signs his most classic novel, probably, and He does so facing the father-son conflict in moderation in the middle of a novel in which not a few real people walk around as characters through it. The protagonist, Jed, maintains a sporadic relationship with his father, an ex-architect confined in a nursing home, with a miserable personal life and who, at one point in the novel, opens his son with a horrific revelation. The father, the son and the solitude by which both walk are only one of the many ingredients of a novel that dissects the art with intelligence and sarcasm.
'In times of waning light', by Eugen Ruge
Houellebecq's novel has immediately reminded me of this one, although they have nothing to do with each other, but again that almost forced relationship of the father with the son plans throughout the novel. On this occasion we attended several generations of East Germans in a story that travels back and forth in time and covers from the fifties to the beginning of the new millennium. The character that spreads the whole story, Alexander, attends the end of the life of his father, sick with Alzheimer's disease, and his own, since he has an incurable cancer. In the middle, a piece of our recent history - who does not remember the fall of the Berlin Wall - told how it is best digested: through characters that it costs nothing to fall in love with.
'The metamorphosis', by Franz Kafka
Kafka's relationship with his authoritarian father - terrible, painful to the point of marking his entire existence - goes through the entire work of the author, but in Metamorphosis This nexus reaches new levels of repulsion since the son is literally an insect. Mr. Samsa, the protagonist's father, not only feels hate and contempt for his son's new physical appearance, but also physically aggravates him and leaves him badly injured. But this short novel is much more: full of metaphors and autobiographical winks, it reads very quickly and the feeling it leaves is as unsettling as it is intense.
'I confess', by Jaume Cabré
Here is one of the books that have marked my life. I confess It is the story of a violin, it is the story of Europe, it is the story of evil and it is also the story of a son with his father and his mother. The protagonist is born, grows and becomes an adult and then an old man marked by a childhood in which his father had the ambition to make him a humanist, concerned about his intellectual development, but not at all for the affective. However, somehow that relationship of absent father ends up owning it ... In my humble opinion, one of the great novels of the 21st century.
'The shadow of the wind', by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In another corner of literature we find Ruiz Zafón, a novelist who has earned his ability to sell books like donuts. In what is his most acclaimed novel we see a kind father-son relationship, that of Mr. Sempere and his son Daniel, protagonist of this gothic adventure that takes place in postwar Barcelona. Mr. Sempere will show his son the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, origin and end of all a plot that becomes more and more entangled and that achieves, at the end of each chapter, leaving us wanting to continue. Essential if you like books with a lot of action.
'The Discreet Hero', by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Peruvian was also a man marked by the absence, first, and the violence, then, of a father who abandoned him before he was born and who mistreated him when he regained his relationship with his mother. In his vast work the figure of the father is not that it has a very specific weight, but in this novel, in which two parallel plots intersect, fatherhood occupies a preponderant place. One of the protagonists, Felícito, doubts the paternity of his children due to the difference of physical traits between him and them, and has his own father as a fuze to move forward in life, especially when he is the victim of extortion; Ishmael, the other central character, is a vindictive father who returns to his children the coin after knowing that they celebrated his death - before time, yes.
'The invention of loneliness', by Paul Auster
The relationship with the father and fatherhood are the two central axes of this story that is divided into these two parts. Looking at the father and knowing what, as a father, you are going to project on your son, is a frequent literary resource that Auster handles with mastery. In the first of the two parts, 'Portrait of an invisible man', Auster remembers his father and, in his own way, pays his particular tribute, in an attempt that the entire life of this, which is no longer, no fade away with him. The second, 'The book of memory', explains his own experience as a father and discusses the need for memories to stay alive. If you like Auster, an extraordinary author, you will enjoy it very much.
'Don't move', by Margaret Mazzantini
This book, one of the best-selling and acclaimed in Italy in recent years and with its version for the cinema - Penelope Cruz was one of its protagonists - shows paternity in a heartbreaking tone. Timothy is watching over his daughter, in a coma due to a motorcycle accident, and plunges into a monologue that pretends to be a dialogue with her and where he opens his heart to memories and moments of his past that hold him. If you like novels with intensity, but with an agile rhythm that will make you devour its pages without finding out, you should look at it. Of course, well provided with kleenex.
'Heritage: a true story', by Philip Roth
The great forgotten by the Nobel Prize for Literature builds, like Giralt Torrente, a story about the father (not surprisingly, heritage comes from the Latin words patri Y monium, that is, "what was received by the father's line"). Specifically, about the illness, agony and death of Herman Roth, his father. The complicated relationship between the two, the love also tinged with fear, the very fact of facing pain and the end of life are reflections that Roth weaves with the determination to take us to the darkest corners of our thoughts. In Babies and More | The mother in the novel: nine books to ponder
