February 15, 2025
A woman reflects on her mercurial, globe-trotting father. Walger's autobiographical novel abounds with contradictions, both in the lives it covers and the structure it takes. The first chapter acknowledges that the story told here is only part of its narrator's life--and that her mother isn't thrilled by her decision to write about her absent father. "My mother tells me she will never read this," Walger writes, then shifts the focus first to herself in the present day, where she's a mother of two during the middle of the pandemic, and then to the circumstances by which her parents met. That story has a lengthy prelude that establishes both the vast geographic scope of this book and the narrator's father's penchant for getting in over his head. In this case, it's with a business deal in Kinshasa, where his "French accent is swamped by his Argentine one and he must repeat himself several times." The aftermath of that arrangement takes him to Spain and then England, where he and the narrator's mother marry--with "two continents, two languages, and eight years between them." The newlyweds move to Argentina, where they brush up against Peronist political agitators. When the narrator's mother gets pregnant, the family returns to Britain. Fatherhood doesn't slow her father's ambitions or his penchant for dangerous situations, though--over the years he takes an interest in everything from scrap metal to futures trading--the latter accompanied by some small-scale cocaine dealing. The father has a checkered history with families: "He left daughters littered behind him like a careless man might leave expensive raincoats." Yet the tone Walger takes here is both empathic and cautionary in its specifics. A haunted story of a charismatic and deeply flawed man--and the people left in his wake.
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