Héctor Abad Faciolince - a brilliant lesson in Colombian history, as it fluctuates between past, “nonexistent future, which is over for us or ending,” and “the present, the here and now, in these few moments of life left to us.”

Héctor Abad, The Farm, Trans. by Anne McLean, Archipelago, 2018.

Closely knit Colombian siblings' internal rifts threaten to tear apart the hard-won legacy their father fought to establish against guerilla and paramilitary violence. An intimate and transgressive novel that confirms Héctor Abad as one of the great writers of Latin American literature today.Pilar, Eva, and Antonio Ángel are the last heirs of La Oculta, a farm hidden in the mountains of Colombia. The land has survived several generations. It is the landscape of their happiest memories but it is also where they have had to face the siege of violence and terror, restlessness and flight.
In The Farm, Héctor Abad illuminates the vicissitudes of a family and of a people, as well as of the voices of these three siblings, recounting their loves, fears, desires, and hopes, all against a dazzling backdrop. We enter their lives at the moment when they are about to lose the paradise on which they built their dreams and their reality.

Pensive novel, by noted Colombian writer Abad (Oblivion: A Memoir, 2012, etc.), of a rural family torn by conflict and incomprehension.

Pilar lives on La Oculta, her family’s farm in Antioquia, the mountainous Colombian province. She is, she declares, uninterested in the past: not her family’s, not that of the people who carved these farms out of the jungle, not that of the revolutionary movement that has torn the land in civil war. “That’s nothing to do with me,” she declares in a moment of anti–Marquez-ian repudiation. Still, as Abad’s novel opens, the past is laid out before Pilar, her sister, Eva, and her brother, Antonio, whom Eva summons with the bad news from Pilar that their mother has died. Antonio has long since left the countryside for New York, where he plays on the B team of the orchestra, gives violin lessons, and writes old-fashioned formal poems; his American lover, Jon, has formed a deep affection for La Oculta, and now the siblings struggle with what to do with it. Pilar wants to keep it, and so does Antonio, but something dark happened there, so much so that Eva wants nothing to do with her ancestral place. Abad slowly reveals what that is while differentiating the three, who share resemblances while being very different people who, deep into adulthood, have drifted very far apart. Abad studs his novel with sharply drawn aperçus: “Beauty is like a prison sentence: it opens all doors to you and then closes them,” says the ascetic Pilar, while Antonio, who professes to love each sister equally, muses on the many ways they have rebelled against the past: “It’s impossible to dictate rules that contradict human nature,” he resolves, even as Pilar invents new rules to chase away chaos and the world-weary Eva transgresses them—and even as La Oculta becomes a very different place from the one they knew.

A graceful story that takes its time to unfold, with much roiling under the surface of the narrative.
—Kirkus Reviews

A history of Colombia in miniature, Abad’s arresting novel (after the memoir Oblivion) tells the story of La Oculta, a farm hidden in the mountains outside Medellín that has weathered guerilla and paramilitary violence but whose future is anything but secure. After the death of their mother, three siblings are reunited at La Oculta in order to determine its fate while reckoning with the personal differences that threaten to tear them apart. Toño, a gay violinist and amateur poet and historian, is summoned back to Colombia from New York and becomes obsessed with exploring the history of his family. He is met by his older sister, Pilar, a corpse dresser possessing an almost supernatural relationship with the dead who have drowned in the farm’s river, whose son Lucas was once kidnapped and held by guerillas for a year. Toño and Pilar’s sister, Eva, is traumatized by a past episode in which the farm was nearly burned to the ground by a criminal organization called El Músico. During their time on the farm, the siblings tidy up and discuss their heritage through the farm and their own personal experiences, while the threat of violence lurks in the background. Abad’s novel occasionally drags, but it’s a brilliant lesson in Colombian history, as it fluctuates between past, “nonexistent future, which is over for us or ending,” and “the present, the here and now, in these few moments of life left to us.” — Publishers Weekly

In The Farm, Héctor Abad turns memory into “a cork in a whirlpool, circling around the same things all the time.” Set against the stunning landscape of Antioquia, the novel revolves between the lives of the three Angél siblings and their reflections on their family’s farm, La Oculta. To Antonio, the small farm is not only a paradise, but an artifact of his ancestors, whose history he has painstakingly researched and compiled. For Eva, the house is a dark reminder of her near deadly run-in with Colombia’s paramilitaries and their attempt to seize the land. And for Pilar, the eldest, La Oculta is “the resting place” where she will live out her days with her beloved Alberto, analyzing the lives of her siblings.
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, Abad’s prose shines with the dreams of the Antioquian settlers who attempted to create a utopia for their descendants. But the novel also casts shadows—nightmares taking the form of guerrilla kidnappings, threats and massacres of the paramilitaries, and the ghosts of all who have drowned at La Oculta lake. The Angél siblings recount, assess, and cross-reference these events into a comprehensive portrait of their family, revealing how a land’s history can bind or divide our families, while always calling us to return home. - The Arkansas International

Building on his well-received memoir, “Oblivion,” about the murder of his father by paramilitaries, the Colombian writer Abad tells a family story in “The Farm,” a novel that deploys the tragic events of his country’s history as background. La Oculta is the farm of the title, a property in Colombia’s rural northwest that the Ángel family has inhabited since the mid-19th century. When Ana, the matriarch, dies, her three children must decide what to do with it: Eva, occupied almost exclusively with her love affairs, wants to sell the land; Pilar, the eldest sibling, wants to hang onto it, as does Antonio, a violinist living in New York with his husband.

The impulse to filter national history through a family story is not uncommon in Latin American fiction. “The Farm,” recounted by each sibling in alternating chapters, is pervaded by Colombian history, especially in the sections featuring Antonio, the family archivist; he explains the property’s origins, which date to the colonization of the territory south of the Cauca River at the end of the wars for independence. There, the 19th-century project of a Colombian Arcadia eventually collapsed under the strain of La Violencia (as the confrontation between liberals and conservatives was called) and the arrival of guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug trafficking, illegal mining and, finally, real-estate speculation.

Abad casts a moral gaze over these facts through his characters. Among them Pilar stands out for her delicate and memorable turns of phrase. Nevertheless, her narration, like that of her siblings, is weighed down by repetitions, long descriptions and digressions — on food, mainly — and a cloying sensibility that may alienate some readers. —Patricio Pron, The New York Times Book Review

The eponymous farm at the heart of Héctor Abad’s new novel is tucked into a verdant corner of northwest Colombia. Known as La Oculta, it’s “a good hiding place,” says one character, “and its name itself means hidden: nobody arrives there who doesn’t know the way perfectly.” It’s been the Ángel family homestead for many years, but now, with the matriarch’s death, the farm’s future is in doubt. Should the Ángels sell or stay put? It’s a question with just two potential answers, but as debated by the three middle-aged siblings who stand to inherit the land, it’s a matter of great complexity.

The Farm is a sweeping, satisfying tale about the interplay of family life and national history. Pilar, the eldest surviving Ángel, raised her children amid the coffee plants and cattle pastures, and she doesn’t want to leave. Her sister, Eva, however, would happily part with La Oculta; she was nearly murdered there by paramilitaries who wanted the land for themselves. As for youngest sibling Antonio, he’s decamped to Manhattan, where he lives with his husband. Though still wounded by the homophobia he encountered during his teens, Antonio is nostalgic about his boyhood home. If the proposed sale is put to a vote, he’ll cast the deciding ballot. 

The novel’s three main characters share the narrative duties, and each is a memorable, distinct figure. Antonio, a professional violinist, spends his spare time studying Colombian history; the chapters told in his voice provide a wealth of detail about the settlers who populated the rough terrain outside Medellín as well as the political and drug-related violence of recent decades. Eva, bookish and independent, has divorced three times, but late in the book she embarks on what might be her first truly fulfilling relationship. Pilar, meanwhile, is an unreconstructed romantic, deeply in love with her home and willing to take deceptive measures to hold onto it.

Abad explored several similar themes in Oblivion, his effusively praised memoir about a family tragedy, which was published in the US in 2012. In a sense, he’s like some of the characters in The Farm, doubling back to a piece of land that he knows extremely well. With perceptive novels like this one, Abad is carving out an enviable niche in Colombia’s celebrated literary tradition. —Kevin Canfield, World Literature Today

Set in Colombia, The Farm by Héctor Abad is a lush story told in three alternating voices. Antonio, Eva and Pilar are siblings who have inherited La Oculta, the family farm, after the death of their mother. Their story documents how one family came to live and work at La Oculta, and Abad embellishes it with violence, intrigue, suspense, traditions and Colombian culture. Although Antonio lives in New York City with his husband, Jon, he returns to the farm several times a year and takes it upon himself to gather the family's genealogical history. Pilar is the most tradition-bound of the three, content to marry the first man she falls in love with and have many children. Meanwhile, Eva is the free spirit constantly searching for new adventures and relationships.

Abad beautifully intertwines these three distinct personalities against the backdrop of La Oculta and the people who work for the family. He is expert in his ability to describe the feelings the siblings have for one another, for their parents and friends. His descriptions of the land make the reader fall in love with the place, creating a sense of nostalgia for a fictional site filled with mountains, a lake, fruit trees and an old house stuffed with memories. When conflict arises among the siblings and La Oculta is threatened, readers viscerally share in the pain they experience as the story reaches its moving conclusion.  —  Lee E. Cart, Shelf Awareness

Héctor Abad’s The Farm is not the book it at first appears to be.A meditation on history and family in Colombia, The Farm recounts the story of the Ángel family from the perspectives of three of its members, Pilar, Eva, and Antonio, as they contemplate the past, present, and future of La Oculta, the remote family farm that serves as homestead and countryside retreat, dream and nightmare, for generations of their family.

But The Farm is also so much more.
Written from the perspective of the three siblings, each chapter reconstructs a particular and unique history of the town and region in Colombia where the farm is hidden, as well as that of the farm itself, and the family that built and is now struggling to maintain it. Each of their voices circles around the events that define the family, what Pilar calls “the things that have happened, the things that still happen on this farm. First those who’ve drowned in the lake (five, as far as I know)… Lucas getting kidnapped… The time when they came here to kill Eva. Deaths of previous Ángels.”

Considering the structure of the book, one wonders whether it is meant to provide a kaleidoscopic view of this world through our three narrators with La Oculta as their muse or if Abad’s real interest is in exploring something much deeper. Reading through the first chapters, I couldn’t help feeling that there was another story that Abad could have told about the Ángels, La Oculta, and Colombia if The Farm had been written with a different structure: from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, or from just one of these characters, each of whose voices could, on their own, have easily carried the whole novel. But the more I read, the more deeply and quite personally, I began to appreciate the characters for who they were, characters whose voices Abad so carefully prepared and translator, Anne McLean, clearly took great pains to preserve.

Pilar, the calm voice of tradition, is steadfast and faithful, practical and present. Antonio is the voice of history but is also the most physically distant from the farm and the family, and so also the most nostalgic. While Eva’s is the voice of personal and interpersonal struggle. She abides as burdened free spirit, constantly seeking escape from all that both Antonio and Pilar represent. These perspectives reveal themselves in their musings on La Oculta.
Antonio writes:

Giving up a farm like La Oculta is like giving up someone we once believed was the love of our lives. What was the farm? A small fulfilled promise of what America was said to be and mostly was not: a place where you can get a piece of land if you work hard. What was love? Something you were going to receive forever, if you always gave it; somewhere you went to sow, to reap, and to die. Pilar still trusted those dreams…

While Eva says:

I love and I hate the countryside. But maybe La Oculta might not be exactly the countryside, but rather something else. La Oculta is the deepest and most obscure part of our origin, the black, smelly, fertilizer that everyone in our family grew out of.

And Pilar:

They tell me I’m the most antiquated of the siblings, but let’s just see, deep down I’m the most modern, the one who doesn’t look to the past, like Toño, or to the non-existent future, which is over for us or ending, like Eva. I’m the one who lives in the present, here and now, in these few moments of life left to us, and its best to live them without crying, in a beautiful, bright, new house, in a house rebuilt with goodwill.

Does this approach help Abad tell his story about Colombia?  In his celebrated memoir, Oblivion, Abad depicts his Colombia as brimming with love and tainted by violence, and as a place for which he feels both nostalgia and despair. The reader may find that this very personal approach to telling the story of The Farm is indeed a powerful way to further explore these themes. Abad can explore History/history/myth, the passage of time (past/present/future), sexuality/love/marriage, ambition/need/desire, the interplay of individual/family/community, through the voices of each sibling whose unique explorations will move different readers in different ways. As the personal and family histories build and intertwine, each narrators’ words nourish and thrive off the others. Each of us will find something personal or familiar or profound to identify with in one of the three characters, an exercise I found most enjoyable as I considered and internalized the spirit of each one. It is essential that we hear and understand these competing narratives to understand the meaning of The Farm. — Catherine Belshaw, Asymptote Journal

"Mirrored so as to reflect one another, the glossy, dark, and quiet rings form and swirl out as if produced by a pebble thrown into the farm's deep nameless lake...Abad's skill in The Farm, and a reason he is one of Columbia's most magnetic writers, is the capacity to embody the pebble, positioning himself in the center of rippling circles in order to appreciate the force from every surrounding point." —Nathaniel Popkin, Rain Taxi Review

"Although the work is presented as a chorus of three voices, those of the siblings who narrate the events for us, this trio blends into one voice, that of the author, who becomes the ventriloquist for The Farm, the true protagonist...Héctor Abad Faciolince invites readers to discover what this book conceals or reveals in its chorus of three siblings’ voices as they alternate like soloists, speaking of the true protagonist of the story, a rural farm that could imprison or liberate, lock or unlock, depending on the lens through which it is viewed." —Dixon Acosta Medellín, El Espectador

The Farm around which Colombian writer Hector Abad’s substantial novel revolves is called La Oculta. Its name means hidden, or the hideaway, but, as the characters learn over the years, it is not remote or concealed enough to keep them from harm.

La Oculta lies in the Andes and looks, to the outside eye, like an idyll: richly fertile, with cattle, a lake and horses which the narrator, Antonio Angel, loves to ride. Antonio is a musician and teacher who lives in New York. His affection for the farm is profound and instinctual.

As he reflects of his husband Jon, “A person gets used to a body the way one gets used to a farm or a landscape”. Jon is his rib, but so too is La Oculta. Yet despite loving the first place he called home, he fled Colombia many years before and has since returned mainly to visit his mother. It is her unexpected death that prompts the tale to begin.
Antonio, like all his family, has mixed feelings for the place. These must now be assembled into a rational argument for him and his sisters Pilar and Eva either to keep La Oculta or to sell and leave it forever. He is inclined to keep it, and Pilar will consider no alternative. It is Eva who cannot sell fast enough. “Since she’d almost been murdered there,” her brother tells us, “she no longer trusted that land which we’d inherited as our own safe haven.”
What The Farm loses by title, it makes up in Abad’s singing style and confiding, conversational manner. One of Colombia’s most eminent novelists, rooted in the grim politics and social issues of his lifetime, his magical realist forebears now seem distant.
Yet the fiction he writes, in short stories as well as novels, is beguilingly sugared, its barbed wire core
appealingly coated in an upbeat, often droll tone.
Like the middle-aged characters in the novel, Abad’s relationship with his homeland is complicated, haunted by memories of extreme violence. In 1987 his father, who was a doctor and a human rights champion, was murdered by Colombian paramilitaries. It took 20 years for Abad to write about that, in Oblivion (2006). Now, with this novel, he dives headlong again into that terrifying era, as witnessed by the Angel family.

Diving is the right image, because it is by throwing herself into the lake that Eva escaped the intruders who intended to kill her.

For two or three days after their bullets barely missed her, she had to find her way back to Medellin by her own wits, evading her pursuers while suffering brutal injuries from a fall. Thereafter it is years before she will go back to La Oculta.
Her attackers were part of the mafia mob working in league with the paramilitaries. They kept control of the region, the whirr of their chainsaws the prelude to unspeakable horrors.

The Angels are a target because they have refused to pay protection money and while they are not the wealthy family they once were, having sold the farm off piecemeal over the years, by comparison with their neighbours they are enviably well-off.

The Farm is told by the siblings in turn, although Antonio gets the lion’s share. The youngest, he is also the keeper of the Angel clan’s history, delving back to the mid-19th century when their forebears arrived on foot to stake a claim to a parcel of land in Antioquia and make their fortunes with back-breaking labour.

Since then, it has been the Angel family creed that their only hope of salvation and safety lies in the land. As The Farm unfolds, that certainty is severely tested.
The idealistic pioneer who led the original settlers started out with high hopes. It was his belief that all newcomers should start with roughly the same chance of success.
As he said, “there are not only injustices committed by men; there are also injustices of destiny, as a poet once said... but for now everyone is going to start, if not with exactly the same, then with something that is very similar: land.”
True to his fears, in little over a century’s time, what had begun as an egalitarian project had been distorted by all the human vices, greed, covetousness, sloth and deceit. And by random fate. By the 1980s, this region of Colombia was a snake pit, where silence was the wisest option, as was a metaphorical blindfold, if one wanted to survive.

Abad’s narrators encapsulate Colombia old and new. Pilar, the eldest, married at 17 and has remained happily with her husband all that time, never wishing to leave or have a career.
She is tradition incarnate, her existence revolving around family, and still in thrall to the church – though in reality paying lip-service only. In her fidelity to Colombia, and the farm, and the notion of everlasting union, the old country is kept alive.
Eva, by comparison, is flighty. Academically gifted and beautiful, she has been married thrice, and after her near-death experience at La Oculta, loathes it as she hated the worst of her husbands. Her fly-by-night temperament is in tune with the restlessness of politically aware and anxious modern times.
Antonio fits somewhere in between. Gay, but long-settled, nostalgic for his childhood home yet by now as much a New Yorker as a Colombian, he is the linchpin for the family, a bridge between the ill-matched sisters, and constantly reminding them of the early Angels who made the farm, and at what cost.
Gradually, the intertwined voices of the Angel brood take the reader back and forwards into the recent and distant past.
Through their eyes we see the ways of Colombian society, the minutiae of household politics, the obscenity of government corruption and the continuing fragility of the situation in a country where terror has sunk deep roots.
In Abad’s hands, it is a tale you don’t wish to end. He does not smooth the rough edges, nor sentimentalise his characters.
They are as emotionally calloused and inconsistent as you or I. The Farm is told with love of the memories the country holds, fury at those who ravaged it and sorrow at everything that has been lost. This richly evocative saga is so persuasively alluring, it suggests the greatest of these is love.
—Rosemary Goring, Herald Scotland 

“At the center of Abad’s sprawling novel is an archetypal scenario: three grown siblings wrestling with what to do when they inherit their family’s farm upon the death of their mother... The overall effect creates a fantastic sense of the place described, while also illuminating the way that gaps in knowledge can shape who we are today." —Tobias Carrol, Words Without Borders
When the Angel family's beloved home in the Antioquian wilderness falls into danger, they manage to defend it against the guerrillas and, later, the paramilitaries - but at a high price. After their parents' death, Pilar, Eva and Tono have to decide the fate of their father's legacy. While Pilar and Tono want to keep La Oculta, Eva, who experienced something terrible at the old farm house, is determined to sell. As the siblings each struggle with their own problems, their inner conflicts threaten to tear apart not only their home but also their family. The Farm is, first and foremost, a novel about the concept of home: how we identify home and how the idea of it means different things to different people. In this book three siblings, Pilar, Eva and Tono, take it in turns to narrate their stories of their family home. The farm itself, La Oculta, was hewn from pristine Colombian rock and forest some 150 years earlier by their ancestor and has experienced changing fortunes in a tumultuous country since then.
I liked how each sibling has a very distinct character and voice. Pilar is happily married to her childhood sweetheart and cannot imagine ever being without La Oculta as her home. Eva has been through a number of marriages and relationships and, for her, home is fleeting. Wherever she lives at that moment is home, but she could move elsewhere  next week and live just as happily. Tono has settled down and married his artist boyfriend in New York but returns regularly to La Oculta. For him, the history of the place is what defines it and he is happier delving into La Oculta's past than in dealing with it's present problems.
The Farm feels like an epic read in that it has a large scope of characters and time periods. I enjoyed discovering the old history through Tono's chapters and the recent history from Eva's. The Colombian landscape and Antioquian people are brought vividly to life and I appreciated seeing how the relatively remote township came to exist and then to thrive. At times, particularly earlier on in the book, The Farm felt a little repetitive. I thought this more the case when the characters were establishing themselves and we were sometimes told things about them more than once, but this turned out to be good grounding for later on. This novel explores home and family in a way that I found familiar even though I think this is only the second Colombian-authored novel I have read. The experience of generation gaps and differing expectations is illustrated through Tono's and Eva's American lives while Pilar is more rooted in the mountain community traditions. This is a lovely novel to immerse oneself in and I think would make a good Book Club choice as it raises deep issues to think over and discuss. - Stephanie Jane

"From Colombia, fifty years after the magic realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude, comes Hector Abad’s THE FARM, a superbly-written novel of equal magnitude, but entirely realistic. The government land turns out to be worthless, untamed wilderness that produces only snakes, jaguars and mosquitos. Abad’s brave, stubborn ancestors turn it into an empire. Meet the three siblings of the Angel family, who take turns telling the story: Pilar, who has only loved her husband Alberto her whole life; beautiful Eva, married three times, remembering the night she escaped being murdered by a band of paramilitary thugs, and Antonio, gay violinist living in New York with his black husband, researching the very history you are reading about their ancient family farm." — Nick DiMartino

Héctor Abad: 'I no longer feel like a victim'

Héctor Abad, Recipes for Sad Women, Trans. by Anne McLean, Pushkin Press, 2012.

No one knows the recipe for happiness—and yet Héctor Abad offers us a whole volume. His recipes, at times bizarre, at times wise, appear able to cure almost anything. With ingenuity and subtle humor, Abad proffers practical advice on how to eschew sadness, attract joy, and retain delight.


"I store up what I have read by Héctor Abad like spherical, polished, luminous little balls of bread, ready for when I have to walk through a vast forest in the night-time." - Manuel Rivas

Would you like a recipe that will, infallibly, prevent you from feeling guilt? Here it is: dinosaur meat. Of course you can't find dinosaur meat, that would be impossible. But you can, if you are lucky, find and eat a fillet of that living fossil, the coelacanth. Mammoth meat, we are told, also causes laughter.

Ah, South American whimsy. Or, if you prefer, magical realism. It has been so long out of favour that maybe it is coming back into style. But no (this book was first published in 1996, under the euphonious title Tratado de Culinaria Para Mujeres Tristes) – there's more going on here. For a start, this book isn't even pretending to be a novel. It's just 156 pages – in that delightful, squat, Pushkin house format, on good paper; the price tag is by no means an outrage – detailing brief ways of fending off, obviously, various kinds of tristesse.

This isn't, I think, just done for the fun of it, fun though it is. "We live in a sad, violent country," the author writes in the course of his mammoth "recipe"; and I think this is a legitimate response to having your beloved father shot by rightwing Colombian paramilitaries and being obliged in turn to flee the country. It may or may not be relevant to note here that his father's crimes included drawing attention to the level of malnutrition in the country. You see? Even the flightiest of fantasies can have deep, dark roots. (Abad's account of his father, Oblivion: a Memoir, is published by Old Street.)
Not that he makes too much of this. I suppose it is not something one wants to make too much of in a work like this: it is a book of supposed cures for sadness. The idea is that this is what the book itself should actually be doing. The deep sadness behind it, largely unseen, is the weight that gives this seemingly airy work ballast.
If there is a particular recurring theme in the book, it is sex, and love, both good and bad. How could this not be, when the root meaning of the word "carnal" comes from a word for "flesh"? Reminding us that women "belong to a sex that knows no exhaustion in pleasure … it's one of the greatest advantages females have over us weak males, exhausted with three cries". He warns us against sexual abstinence: "Oh, those who talk of the excesses of youth as the cause of their decadence. What idiots. Goethe did it until the end of his days and there've been few men as happy as he was."

The recipes can be no more than straightforward practical advice, delivered in a language that makes these things seem new again: "While you're not sure of the man who loves you, make sure he wraps up in latex." (I suspect that in the original the repetition of "sure" on either side of the comma was more noticeable. Still, at least the translator noticed it.)

It is this deadpan, abstracted tone, whether applied to coelacanth or sensible sexual precautions, that gives the book its own distinctive charm – in fact, you could say that many of the entries here are not so much recipes as charms, in the sense of spells. For instance, we have a "a recipe for dissolving the memory of a bad past love affair", which involves the dissolving with salt, and then burial in a handkerchief, of a slug. The rationale for this – there is always a rationale for this kind of thing, for this is the point of magic; the sublimation of properties, like metaphors made real, is the reason why spells are a kind of literature – is that to have loved someone and then gone horribly off them is "like loving a warrior in armour from which emerges, all of a sudden, the weak, slimy jelly of an abominable being".

This is a book that quietly knows what it is to be human, and to bridge, or reconcile, the gap between body and mind. On what to give to friends: "The pâté reminds friends that they are flesh. The bread won't let them forget that all is born of the Earth and returns to her. The spirit of the Sauternes wine revives what makes us most lively – the possibility of uniting two minds."

- Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Héctor Abad Faciolince, Joy of Being Awake, Brookline Books/Lumen Editions, 1996.

Saint or sinner? Moralist or scoundrel? Ascetic or voluptuary? The reader must draw his or her own conclusions as Don Gregorio Benjamin Gaspar de Medina, aging memoirist and protagonist, offers up for scrutiny the events of his checkered life and the substance of his diverse opinions. His narrative begins at the age of 15 at his family's Colombian countryside villa, when he simultaneously discovers that he is wealthy and that kisses are not shared only with the lips. Six decades later in Vienna, the story culminates with his marriage to the delectable Cunegonde Bonaventura, his erstwhile secretary and transcriber of his memoirs.

Héctor Abad, Oblivion: A Memoir, Trans. by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Colombian author Abad (The Joy of Being Awake) dedicates this loving and sentimental memoir to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a professor and doctor devoted to his family, "moved to tears…by poetry and music," and committed to a better Colombia. The latter aspiration cost him his life when he was assassinated in 1987, and his son began writing this book five years later. Abad spends much of the book expressing his love for his father, but it is his discussion of Gómez's public health and human rights projects—such as founding "the Colombian Institute of Family Wellbeing, which built aqueducts and sewer systems in villages, rural districts, and cities"—that reveals what a remarkable educator, reformer, and activist the senior Abad was, and how his assassination (most likely ordered by Colombia's political leadership at the time) was a tragedy for a family and a nation. Those unfamiliar with Abad's and Gómez's writings will nevertheless find this timely memoir moving and informative. - Publishers Weekly

Oblivion: A memoir by Hector Abad Faciolince – review | Books | The ...

Oblivion: A memoir by Hector Abad Faciolince – review | Books | The ...

'Oblivion,' a Memoir by Héctor Abad - The New York Times