Walger\u2019s 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\u2019s life\u2014and that her mother isn\u2019t thrilled by her decision to write about her absent father. \u201cMy mother tells me she will never read this,\u201d Walger writes, then shifts the focus first to herself in the present day, where she\u2019s 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\u2019s father\u2019s penchant for getting in over his head. In this case, it\u2019s with a business deal in Kinshasa, where his \u201cFrench accent is swamped by his Argentine one and he must repeat himself several times.\u201d The aftermath of that arrangement takes him to Spain and then England, where he and the narrator\u2019s mother marry\u2014with \u201ctwo continents, two languages, and eight years between them.\u201d The newlyweds move to Argentina, where they brush up against Peronist political agitators. When the narrator\u2019s mother gets pregnant, the family returns to Britain. Fatherhood doesn\u2019t slow her father\u2019s ambitions or his penchant for dangerous situations, though\u2014over the years he takes an interest in everything from scrap metal to futures trading\u2014the latter accompanied by some small-scale cocaine dealing. The father has a checkered history with families: \u201cHe left daughters littered behind him like a careless man might leave expensive raincoats.\u201d Yet the tone Walger takes here is both empathic and cautionary in its specifics.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Walger\u2019s 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\u2019s life\u2014and that her mother isn\u2019t thrilled by her decision to write about her absent father. \u201cMy mother tells me she will never read […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1902,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}