My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain
Pron’s American debut can best be described as a purposefully fragmented mystery narrative, unconstrained by the conventions of that or any other genre. Told “in whispers and with laughter and with tears,” it is a complex look at the legacy and mandate of social struggle in Argentina. A young writer with memory loss returns home to Argentina to say good-bye to his dying father, a journalist. In reviewing the father’s files, the son uncovers the older man’s obsession with the disappearance and murder of a local man whose sister was “disappeared” by the infamous Argentinean military dictatorship in the brutal 1970s. In piecing together the mystery, the son-narrator learns that his parents led secret lives as leaders of an underground Peronist resistance movement. This is a melancholy and chilling work of postmodernism, examining family, memory, and what collective fear does to a society. Pron brilliantly draws a line from individual crime, which interests few, to the epidemic of “social crime,” which transforms generations. From a major new voice in Spanish literature, this novel should grant Pron a much-deserved readership in the English-speaking world. --Jonathan Schwartz