Cabrón

“I write about my father out of necessity. To illuminate a void, not to fill it. I have the right to invent a real memory where only a wound exists.”

Heir to a name, a few gestures, and several objects, a son begins—many years after his father’s death—the affectionate adventure of reconstructing him. Who exactly was he? He could appear loving and sensitive, but also controlling and despotic. How much of what we reject in others lives within ourselves?

This family archaeology unfolds among memories and the objects that survived: his voice on a video, the spectacles he always wore, the chess clock, books mixed with his own, vinyl records. But also a large number of “intangibles”: phrases, loves, enemies, his authoritarian ways, his generosity, a journey they took together.

With a strong poetic pulse and his characteristic narrative voracity, Reynaldo Sietecase takes on the risks imposed by memory and recovers a complex figure—one in which many readers will confront their own ghosts. He does so with the tenderness of someone who revisits the past without resentment and with the sensitivity of someone who knows that every life is, in the end, the story that outlives us.

Cabrón is the story of a man, a family, an era, and a beautiful artifact about that persistent form of mourning that is saying goodbye to a father. Without a doubt, the author’s most intimate and heartfelt book.