A breathtaking short novel about the complicated feelings of hate and
pity in familial love by an acknowledged Latin American master.
A brilliant and dark tour de force, Jewish Son presents the delicate
archeology of the stubbornness of a boy who demands his parents'
attention. It is a brutal confession of the lies necessary to win a
space of approval in a troubled family, a treatise on the excesses of
love and the paradoxical lack of affection that is never enough, an
accomplished narration of childhood from the point of view of the adult
gaze, and a rewriting of Kafka's Letter to His Father.
As his father's imminent death becomes an ever more concrete reality
with surgeries, caregivers, sedatives and his mother grows obsessed with
visits to the rabbi and amasses saint cards and Buddhist prayers, the
narrator evokes the remnants of the rejection that pervaded his
childhood.
Without yielding to the idealization of youth or to the delight in pain
before physical decay and death, Guebel dissects, beautifully although
with discomfort, his very early conversion to the dream of literature as
an act of reparation.
