Gabriel
Delacruz Exposito, an abandoned child who grew up in an orphanage, lives in a
boarding room in Barcelona and works as a furniture removal truck driver.
Always on the move, he was able to live a peripatetic and secretive life. Along
the way, he met four women and had four sons, none of whom knew about each
other.
Sigrun in
Frankfurt, Germany, gives birth to Christof (in show business) in October 1965.
Sarah in London, England, is the mother of Christopher (a second-hand records
dealer), born in 1967. Mireille, in Paris, France, has a son Christophe, a
quantum physics lecturer, in 1969. In 1972, Rita in Barcelona, Spain, has a son
Cristofol, a translator.
Gabriel was
organized. He never mixed up the women’s or his sons’ names, or even their
pronunciations. He learned to pace his relationships with his “equidistant
women” and sons. About every three months or so, he’d turn up. “When he
arrives, he’s on his way out. When he leaves, he stays behind,” said one of the
women.
But after
Valentine’s Day of 1972, three of the women and their sons never hear from him
again. The last woman, Rita, too never hears from Gabriel again when her son is
about three years old – in 1975.
About 20
years later, the police in Barcelona inform Cristofol that his father is
missing (officially). Cristofol’s name was found in Gabriel’s boarding room
when the police invited him to collect his father’s belongings or to pay the
landlady the rental arrears. Cristofol never even knew that his father lived so
close in the same city. Rummaging around his father’s room, he finds the names
of three women and three sons.
The four sons
meet in Barcelona. Christof, Christopher, Christophe, and Cristofol bring to
the meeting photographs of their father. Together they try to understand the
life of their father, and whether he is still alive. They even invent reasons
why they have the same name. They meet regularly, always in Barcelona, to find
their missing father.
The narrator
is predominantly Cristofol, the Barcelona son. Each of the other sons adds
their interpretations to the story, although Cristofol is the “translator” such
that the tone of the novel is rather like a collaboration of efforts. They
compare photographs, their mother’s impressions of their father, their memories,
and items found in their father’s boarding room. Sometimes jumping around in
time, and other times, chronological, it is the tale of four sons coming to
terms with being abandoned, yet curious about their father’s character, and his
missing years. But they are also curious about each other – are they the same,
are they different, have they assumed their father’s characteristics, and was
it destiny that they eventually meet. Once divided by geography, but united by
genetics, the four half-brothers discover the truth, like piecing together all
the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The novel is
a wonderful mixture of human psychology, itinerant relationships, father and
son bonding and abandonment, humour, sadness, and intrigue. The novel is due for re-release in 2013.
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