Lost Luggage by Jordi Punti: book review

Lost Luggage (2010) is an interesting tale of a man with four sons to four different women.

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.