His mother was a “daily-Mass Catholic,” in local parlance, who had been raised by her uncle, the ultra-Orthodox archbishop of Medellín. The ideological and religious divisions in the Abad family mirrored those of the country as a whole. In the United States he would have been one of many left-leaning Democrats, but in Colombia his initiatives in poor neighborhoods made him an enemy of the state. He describes his father as an “ideological hybrid” who was branded a “bourgeois” by the left because of his opposition to “the armed struggle” and his occasional alliance with Conservative politicians who could advance his health care policies. With a grandiosity that may have been necessary given the obstacles, he fancied himself a new kind of doctor: a “poliatrist,” or healer of the polis.Ībad succumbs at times to the temptation of hagiography, but it is balanced by his struggle with his father’s constant presence, more pervasive than ever in death. As a teacher, he would drag his students to Medellín’s slums, organizing the building of aqueducts and forcing them to examine at close hand the diseases of poverty, in the hope they would take up social medicine instead of treating the wealthy at private clinics. His passion was preventive medicine - clean drinking water and vaccinations for Colombia’s poor. Staunchly anti-Catholic, indifferent to money (he gave most of his modest salary to students and friends), excessively tolerant yet actively involved in his children’s lives, he was, in his son’s telling, a maddening, kindly, liberal crusader for social justice whose enlightened ideas were doomed to failure. The elder Abad was an epidemiologist and the founder of Colombia’s National School of Public Health. In middle age, Abad - a well-known novelist and journalist in Colombia - still gauges his behavior by asking what his father would have done. Like Kafka’s father, Abad’s occupies every inch of his son’s psyche. Reading “Oblivion,” I heard echoes of Kafka’s scalding “Letter to My Father,” though it conveys the opposite emotion. always there to tell you O.K., fine, yes, as you wish,” never offering the relief of the antagonist. They loved each other too much, Abad suggests, and we can feel the strain as he measures himself against this “ideal god. illuminated everything for me with the light of his intelligence.” This tender contract between father and son was never broken. He never said no to me.” Elsewhere, Abad calls him “my one true savior” and “the solitary nocturnal knight who. I felt for my father the same way my friends said they felt about their mothers. “I loved my father with an animal love,” Abad writes, “his smell and also the memory of his smell on the bed when he was away on a trip. In Colombia the saying goes, “A man only has one mother, but his father could be any old son of a bitch.” In literature, we have been conditioned to expect the malignant father of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, say, or the predatory father of Edward St. But every word revolves around the author’s father, also named Héctor.

The place is Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, and the time is the quarter-century from the early 1960s until 1987.

Thus, while “Oblivion” is suffused with politics, it is primarily, and most powerfully, a highly personal coming-of-age story that’s also a sharp sociopolitical portrait of its place and time.

It’s a way of life.” This war has been going on for at least 150 years - between Liberals and Conservatives (Colombia’s main political parties), secularists and Catholics, armed revolutionaries, drug lords and the army - preventing the country from moving beyond what García Márquez has called its unending “Middle Ages.” One way or another, the national drama has touched practically every Colombian family, Abad’s more than most. “I draw out these memories from within,” Abad tells us, “as one gives birth, as one removes a tumor.”Ĭolombia’s greatest novelist, Gabriel García Márquez, once lamented that “there has always been civil war” in his country “and there always will be. It is obvious that Héctor Abad had no choice but to tell it - as a personal catharsis, surely, but also as a reckoning with his country, Colombia, and its near-perpetual state of violent strife. From the first pages we feel the internal necessity driving this story. “Oblivion” is a searing memoir written with love and blood: both family blood, the kind that’s thicker than water, and the spilled blood of barbarism and murder.

Oblivion the hit list