The Jewish son A novel

In Argentine writer Guebel's potent blend of autobiographical fiction and criticism (after The Absolute), he analyzes his relationship with his 89-year-old father and reflects on Franz Kafka's Letter to His Father. Daniel regularly shuttles Luis, who has terminal prostate cancer, from Luis's home to the hospital. During their time together, Daniel quizzes Luis to help spark his memory ("When I ask him his what his name is, he says: 'Me' ") and entertains Luis with games of dominoes. In flashbacks, Daniel recounts a childhood rife with antisemitic schoolyard bullies, beatings from Luis, and attempts to win over Luis's affection. As Daniel grows older, his father's physical abuse turns verbal, and while working at the family's refrigerator store, Daniel is tasked with an endless barrage of menial and demeaning duties. Throughout, Daniel meditates on Kafka's account of his own complicated relationship with his father ("What the text constantly says is: that which I am, Father, you shall never understand"), and finds contrasts between himself and Kafka, as he matures into the role of caretaker. Along the way, he arrives at striking insights on the fragility of masculinity. A satisfying story emerges from Guebel's searching study. (Apr.)

A son confronts memories of his father. You'd be forgiven for assuming Guebel's latest book is a memoir. It certainly reads like one: The narrator, also named Daniel, recounts a traumatic childhood with parents who offered him neither acceptance, understanding, nor basic affection. "I saw in my parents' eyes," he writes, "not just premature disenchantment and irritation, but also, or so I believed, a desire to see me vanish by way of some catastrophic miracle." There is no plot, per se, and Daniel--who, like his creator, eventually became an author--leads the reader from memory to memory in an order that is more stream of consciousness than chronological. At particular issue here is Daniel's father, who, when Daniel was still a child, would beat him with a belt. Daniel says of his father's spankings: "his was not a methodical 'sweep' of the totality but a partial intervention dictated by chance, at whose discretion the belt landed on new zones or applied itself entirely or partially to a zone already hit." If, among all these details, the reader is reminded of Kafka's Letter to His Father, that connection is more than once made explicit. Kafka's Letter "is one of my favorite books," Daniel tells us. "If I had to choose between rescuing this handbook of self-disparagement and reproach from a blazing fire, or Ulysses, I'd abandon Joyce's pyrotechnic novel to the flames and burn my fingers to save the few pages written by the Czech Jew." As these passages make clear, Guebel's prose tends toward the florid or dense--put plainly, he overwrites. That's a shame. There is much in this slim little book that is affecting, even brilliant, if Guebel would only get out of his own way. Moving at times, the novel is marred by its author's florid prose style. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.