Synopses & Reviews
A breathtaking short novel about the complicated feelings of hate and
pity in familial love by an acknowledged Latin American master.
A brilliant and dark tour de force,
Jewish Son presents the delicate archeology of the stubbornness
of a boy who demands his parents' attention. It is a brutal confession
of the lies necessary to win a space of approval in a troubled family, a
treatise on the excesses of love and the paradoxical lack of affection
that is never enough, an accomplished narration of childhood from the
point of view of the adult gaze, and a rewriting of Kafka's
Letter to His Father.
As his father's imminent death becomes an ever more concrete
reality with surgeries, caregivers, sedatives and his mother grows
obsessed with visits to the rabbi and amasses saint cards and Buddhist
prayers, the narrator evokes the remnants of the rejection that pervaded
his childhood.
Without yielding to the idealization of youth or to the delight
in pain before physical decay and death, Guebel dissects, beautifully
although with discomfort, his very early conversion to the dream of
literature as an act of reparation.
Review
"Guebel measures himself against Kafka as a long-suffering Jewish son,
but also as an author. He acknowledges the Prague-born writer's top
place on the podium of European literature (as he assures us, he
wouldn't hesitate to save him in a fire before Joyce), and like Franz,
he shields himself with writing as a refuge from paternal
incomprehension and cruelty." Violeta Gorodischer, La Nación
Review
"Who does Daniel Guebel resemble as a writer? One might say that his
subversive prose comes from Gogol and Nabokov, or even that he seems an
improbable Argentine Pynchon. But Guebel is great due to his own
qualities." Carlos Pardo, El País
About the Author
One of Argentina's and Latin America's finest writers,
DANIEL GUEBEL is the author of some 17 prior novels, four collections of short stories, and four plays. His novel
The Absolute (Seven Stories, 2022) was named the best work of fiction of 2016 by
La Nación and received the 2017 Literary Prize from the Argentine Academy of Literature.
JESSICA SEQUERIA has translated works by Adolfo Couve, Teresa
Wilms Montt, Sara Gallardo, Liliana Colanzi, Hilda Mundy, Jean de la
Hire, and Maurice Level, among many others.