My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain (Knopf) by Partricio Pron has a premise as intriguing as its title.
The first part begins somewhat mysteriously, with the narrator, returning to his native Argentina from Germany, remembering scraps of his and his family’s past — drug abuse, a car accident, his father’s illness. (“My father was lying beneath a tangle of cord like a fly in a spiderweb.”) The sections are not numbered in correct order (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10).
The second part deals with the disappearance with a father’s friend, Alberto José Burdisso, in 2008. The son finds a collection of articles and pictures saved by his father, who only knew the man briefly in primary school. This leads to several questions, such as:
“Who would want to kill some sort of Faulknerian fool, poorer than a church mouse, in a town where his disappearance would be noticed immediately, a town, where, moreover, many people would know who Burdisso was, what he had done and who was with him in his final hours?”
And why does his father, a journalist, take such an interest in this poor man’s death?
Pron builds up an compelling storyline — and the answers lies in Argentina’s haunted past and the father’s role in politics, even though the man’s death occurred decades after the Dirty War.
“I noticed it had started to rain again, and I told myself I would write that story because what my parents and their comrades had done didn’t deserve to be forgotten, and because I was the product of what they had done, and because what they’d done was worthy of being told because their ghost — not the right or wrong decisions my parents and their comrades had made their spirit itself — was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm.”
Pron is a great writer. The 212-page book, which was translated by Mara Faye Lethem, is simply written with evocative language and a plot that kept me reading. My Father’s Ghost shows the effects of the Dirty War though generations and years.
More about Patricio Pron:
Pron, an Argentine native who lives in Madrid, has written three short story collections and four novels. He has won the Juan Rulfo Short Story Prize and the Jaén Novel Prize.
Source: I received a review copy from the publisher.
The Hispanic Reader 