A foreign son

Eduardo Berti

CHRONICLE, IMPEDIMENTA 2022.136 PAGES.

Following the publication of Un padre extranjero (A Foreign Father), Eduardo Berti receives a wholly unexpected package in the mail: photocopies of a set of documents that his father, who was born in Romania, presented in the 50s to back up his application for Argentine citizenship. They contain almost all the information that his father hid or altered after emigrating to Argentina, including a few secrets he took to his grave: his real surname, his true date of birth, the name of the ship that took him from Europe to the Americas just before the Second World War, and the exact date it arrived in Buenos Aires, the port city where his father commenced reinventing himself. But the most important snippet of information included in the documents, sent by a friend and reader, is the address of his father's childhood home in the Romanian city of Galati on the shores of the Danube, close to the border with Moldavia.

Berti thought that that chapter in his life was over, but he takes this as a sign: an invitation to travel and finally see his father's homeland. There, he discovers that on the other side of the globe (or the looking glass) it is the son who is the real foreigner.

 

 

«A Foreign Son is a short book that nevertheless digs deep.»

Jose Lúis de Monfort, El Club de los Miércoles

 

«The work is an exploration of space and time as if it were a map that by folding over itself contaminates some grids with others, tracing passages between territories and biographies.»

Esther Ferrero

 

«A Foreign Son is a new step forward in the inquiry about identity -traveling to discover oneself- and the impossibility of knowing it.»

Jordi Amat, El País

PUBLISHED BY: Spanish IMPEDIMENTA

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