If Franz Kafka had not used his anger at his father to write down, humanity would have missed that extraordinary universe we call the Kafkaesque. Suffice it to realize that he wanted to call all his work an attempt to avoid the paternal realm. In perhaps the most famous in literature, Letter to his Father, the Czech author made it clear that not only is the image he has of him, but that this conflict between the two is the main engine of his writing; It’s more of an artistic manifesto than a letter of grudge. It establishes itself from impotence and produces work. In other stories such as Condemnation and Transfiguration, he transfers these problems to imaginary families.
In contrast, we owe one of the most emblematic works of Spanish literature, Jorge Manrique’s Coplas a la muerte de su padre, to the feelings evoked by the loss of the poet’s beloved being and prompting him to ask questions. like the passage of time, earthly arrogance and a sense of death.
Confronted with stories in which the main characters are fathers or mothers, writers articulate a common dilemma: the agony of subjugating language while recounting the most intimate. For many, literature as a bond seems to elevate the relationship to an even deeper and unclassifiable encounter. Paul Auster writes in his book The Invention of Solitude that “…the story I’m trying to tell is somehow incongruous with language, the degree of resistance to language is an exact measure of how close I am to saying something really important.” The story of her trying to mourn her father’s death and trying to understand her personality and emotional distance. It also gives him material to consider his own role as a father figure.
He is not the only one who analyzes the meaning of his activity as a writer when talking about his father. The speech Orhan Pamuk read after receiving the Nobel Prize, along with other short texts in My Father’s Suitcase, is a beautiful approach to how his relationship with his father, a writer in the shadows, influenced his commitment to literature and everything it stands for. . « My biggest fear was that my father was a good writer. Because if real great literature came out of your suitcase, I would have to admit that there was a different man inside my father,” she says, before the dilemma of exposing her father’s secret writings.
Something similar happens in Eduardo Berti’s A Foreign Father, now continues in A Foreign Son, where literature and life coexist in the father-son relationship through the turmoil of various migrations and the search for roots, language, identity.
Amos Oz recounts a childhood period when his parents went out with regret in an extraordinary scene: “Books were the only thing in the house… When I was little, I wanted to grow up and be a book”, selling books, eating food when there was nothing left for them. “A great day came for me when I was about six years old: My father made room for me in one of his window displays and asked me to carry my books there,” he says in his autobiography, A Story of Love and Darkness.
His mother’s ignorance and poverty did not prevent Albert Camus, who was left without a father due to the war, from winning the Nobel Prize, which he dedicated to supporting him throughout his career. The First Man is a fictionalized autobiography that Camus still carried in manuscript in his suitcase on the day of his death.
In his article Madres, padrees y otros, Siri Hustvedt brings together portraits of the royal family and names he chose as their literary relatives: Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, among others. A fascinating analysis of mother or father figures in the works of Colm Tóibín, Jane Austen, Henry James, Beckett, Borges and many more, with fantastic New ways to kill your mother.
It is known that writers such as Virginia Woolf or George Eliot could only start writing when their parents died, and when they succeeded in reviving them in their works, they escaped the pressure that silenced them. There are many situations in which illness or death functions as a necessary trigger for a big story, for relief or pain.
Like Borges, Marcel Proust had such a symbiotic bond with his mother that when his mother died, he wrote: “My life has lost its only purpose.” He immediately turned to composing what would become one of the most important works of literature: in search of lost time inspired by his personal life, in which his mother and grandmother occupied a decisive place.
Always original, Georges Perec in W weaves a real chapter and an imaginary chapter on the foundations of his biography, marked by WWII, the Holocaust, the death of his parents, and a very early orphanage. All his work articulates as a nonexistent space and a spiral search for an existing absence.
In heritage. A true story, Philip Roth is faced with the daunting task of recounting his elderly father’s battle with a brain tumor. Ricardo Menéndez Salmón pursues something similar in Entering meekly on that restless night when the Father wants to explain his illness, the relationship between the two. Claudia Piñeiro inspired her novel Elena Knows in her mother’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease, while dedicating it to a Communist father figure in Panties. Peter Handke had to process his mother’s death in a more convoluted circumstance. In Unspeakable Misfortune, he describes the chaos of his life after his mother committed suicide with a drug overdose.
romanized memories
Sooner or later, writers with significant careers take on the task of shaping their memories into further essays or fiction. In them, the relationship with the parents is essential. So, to name just a few of Vladimir Nabokov’s, Speech, memory; John Coetzee, Childhood; Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals etc.
Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman is the author of a trilogy of memoirs. In Good Will he recounts his childhood problems and memories; Children on Sunday are considered Intimate Confessions, which is the novel about the father and the part devoted to the mother.
Other novels hide the real lives of their authors, such as Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Un mundo para Julius, and Elena Poniatowska, La flor de lis. Both are portraits of the Latin American upper class, in which bosom mothers and fathers appear as ephemeral figures, graceful and inaccessible to children raised by nannies.
Filmed by Fernando Trueba, Héctor Abad Faciolince’s autobiography El olvido que seremos constructs a loving and grateful portrait of a father whose story runs parallel to that of his native Colombia.
In the context of major changes in Spanish history, in A corazón abierta, Elvira Lindo fictionalizes the story of her parents as a tribute to the generation that survived the post-war era. Manuel Vilas does the same in Ordesa, a sometimes heartbreaking novel in which he also fictionalizes his relationship with his parents. One thousand two hundred steps is the distance that separated Juan Cruz from his childhood and returned to emotionally honor the memory of the most important figures of his early years.
female tensions
With This Will Pass, Milena Busquets revolutionized the literary scene by incorporating the character of her mother, Esther Tusquets, one of the most important names in the Spanish publishing world. And how can we forget the voluminous literary career of Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård, detached from Kafkaesque feelings towards his father? There are six volumes that make up the controversial My War series, the first of which is The Death of the Father.
Some of the most beautiful and popular novels published in recent years depict those that lack simple bonds between mothers and daughters, and those about coexistence that requires a fine balance of irony and realism.
In addition to Natalia Ginzburg’s much-mentioned Family Dictionary, the Italian author creates in Sagittarius a fictional tale of confusion, with Italian humor and most likely based on the character of her own mother.
Violent appendices by the American Vivian Gornik is one of the books that has not ceased to be recommended since its first publication in 2019. Self-portrait of an older daughter reminiscing about her past moments with her elderly mother. A bond that many female readers identify with.
One of the most wonderfully written is that of the Frenchman Delphine de Vigan, Nada opposes the night when the author tries to discover what family events led to her death through a poetic and detective family story.
Annie Ernaux often turns to the private drawer of her personal life to choose topics. One of her most original novels, The Other Girl tries to understand why her parents kept the fact that their first daughter died from her. She discovers this by chance, and reluctantly listens that her mother compares her to her invisible sister, someone more “pretty”, but a terrifying Gordian knot that writing will help her untie.
There are also the words of Angelika Schrobsdorff in this line, among others that have been widely interpreted: You are not like other mothers; Mary Karr’s Liars Club; Calls from the Mother, Carol Fives or Los abysses, Pilar Quintana.