My Father's Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron

My Father's Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

Patricio Pron

A young writer returns to his homeland of Argentina to visit his dying father. His memory is patchy through a combination of pills & pain but he regains a sense of himself as he solves the mystery of his father's past and his obsession with a recent murder. A strange narrative with press cuttings and a jigsaw puzzle of memories, he recalls the horrors of the 1970s' dictatorship and his family's underground resistance to the military regime.

Extract
Children are detectives of their parents, who cast them out into the world so that one day the children will return and tell them their story so that they themselves can understand it. These children aren't judging their parents - it's impossible for them to be truly impartial, since they owe them everything including their lives - but they can try to impose some order on their story, restore the meaning that gets stripped away by the petty events of life and their accumulation, and they can protect that story and perpetuate it in their memory. Children are policemen of their parents...
Parallels
  • Purgatory by Tomas Eloy Martinez
  • An Open Secret by Carlos Gamerro