At the heart of Héctor Abad’s affecting memoir is the profound love and respect he had for his father, a medical doctor, university professor and human rights activist, dedicated to promoting public health care, fighting inequality and defending free expression.

Oblivion
HECTOR ABAD;
Translated by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey
(World Editions, 296 PP, £11.99)
Tablet bookshop price £10.79 • Tel 020 7799 4064

At the heart of Héctor Abad’s affecting memoir is the profound love and respect he had for his father, a medical doctor, university professor and human rights activist, dedicated to promoting public health care, fighting inequality and defending free expression. This honourable career was cut short in 1987 with his violent murder by Colombian right-wing paramilitaries. It took 20 years before Abad had the necessary distance to sit down and write Oblivion; “a letter to a shade”.

His father described himself as “Christian in religion, Marxist in economics and a Liberal in politics”. Abad’s mother came from a deeply religious family; her uncle was the Archbishop of Medellín. Abad eloquently describes his childhood as a “struggle between reactionary Catholicism and the principles of the Jacobin Enlightenment (combined with a belief in science-led progress)”. This difference of opinion is humorously illustrated in a parental dispute over whom Abad most resembled as a baby: “She swore I was virtually identical to John XXIII, then Pope, while he claimed I was the spitting image of Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

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