“Oblivion Awaits at the End” is a moving tribute to one of Latin America’s most important physicians and to the author’s father, Héctor Abad Gómez. His book is one of the best written descriptions of a deep love between a father and his son that modern literature has to offer.
Translated from Spanish into German by Sabine Giersberg.
Fritz Bauer Bibliothek, Volume 3.
ISBN: 978-3-949379-07-9
“Oblivion awaits at the End” is a moving tribute to one of Latin America’s most important doctors and to the author’s father, Héctor Abad Gómez. A physician who sought to defeat epidemics in his native Colombia, he was targeted by Colombian paramilitaries and murdered on the open road in 1987. Twenty years later, the son paints an unforgettable picture of a man following his conscience during one of the darkest periods in Latin America’s recent history. Beyond the political story, Héctor Abad Faciolince tells of his own growing up in a bourgeois world that was only apparently secure, surrounded by religious customs that seemed archaic. His book is one of the best-written depictions of a deep love between a father and his son that modern literature has to offer. In Spanish, the book has sold over 250,000 copies and was published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The translation has been carefully re-edited by Sabine Giersberg, and at the author’s request, previously abridged passages have been added.
Héctor Abad Faciolince was born in 1958 in Medellín, Colombia, where he studied medicine, philosophy, and journalism. After being expelled from the university for writing a defamatory text against the Pope, he moved to Italy. In 1987, shortly after returning home, his father was assassinated, which he addressed nearly 20 years later in his acclaimed nonfiction novel OBLIVION. In 2008, Abad was a guest in Berlin as part of the DAAD’s Artist-in-Residence program. Today he lives back in Colombia and writes a weekly column for the leading Colombian newspaper “El Espectador”.
OBLIVION sold over 250,000 copies in Spanish and was adapted into a film by Spanish Oscar winner Fernando Trueba. The film was awarded the 2021 Goya Prize for Best Ibero-American Film. (Abad’s latest novel THE FARM was the best-selling novel in Colombia for six months, selling over 75,000 copies.)
Héctor Abad Faciolince, Am Ende artet das Vergessen. Eine Geschichte aus Kolumbien. Bochum: BUXUS EDITION 2022, 208 pages, ISBN 978-3-949379-07-9
