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Oblivion is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written memorial to the author's father, Héctor Abad Gómez, whose criticism of the Colombian regime led to his murder by paramilitaries in 1987. Twenty years in the writing, it paints an unforgettable picture of a man who followed his conscience and paid for it with his life during one of the darkest periods in Latin America's recent history.
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Reviews
"It is very difficult to summarize Oblivion without betraying it, because, like all great works, it is many things at once. To say that it is a heartrending memoir of the author's family and father--who was murdered by a hired assassin--is true, but paltry and infinitesimal, because the book is also a moving immersion into the inferno of Colombian political violence, into the life and soul of the
Mario Vargas Llosa
"[Oblivion] emits a primal yet articulate howl . . . Mr. Abad's prose, in this translation by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey, is elastic and alive . . . In Spanish the verb 'to remember' is 'recordar,' the author reminds us, a word that derives from 'cor,' the Latin for heart. This memoir is extravagantly big-hearted. It will be stocked, in good bookstores, in the nonfiction or belles-lettres sec
Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"[An] admirable effort at speaking the unspeakable, at verbalizing the pain accumulated over decades, is Héctor Abad's extraordinary memoir Oblivion. It's been years since I read such a powerful meditation on loss . . . I confess not to have known of [Abad] before, even though this is his second book translated into English. This ignorance was actually beneficial, for it allowed me to submerge mys
Ilan Stavans, San Francisco Chronicle