Arts
Héctor Abad Faciolince is one of the better known writers not only in his native Colombia but also throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The painful, intimate and insightful recount of his family life and the subsequent assassination of his father, the prominent Dr Abad Gómez, is not only a family memoir but a tacit indicment of a country whose international image is, not unfairly, asssociated with violence. Perhaps because of its sincerity and lack of sentimentality, Oblivion is a book that resonates at many levels. It is a riveting account of how tragedy struck in the midst of an otherwise happy and harmonious home and a historical memoir of Colombian social culture and, in particular, of the society of its second city, Medellin. Perhaps this is not the book its author wishes to be remembered by, but the case is that it is now an international success, translated into twenty different languages and recently relaunched in the English-speaking world. This programme was recorded in front of a live audience at The British Library in London. The interviewer was Juan Toledo