Book Box: Five Gripping Family Sagas Spotlighting Fathers
Dear Reader,
When I think about literary dads, it’s the single fathers I think about.
Like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird who inspires his children by example. And Abel from Kane and Abel who brings up his daughter Florentyna to dream big, to start a business empire and run for the highest office in the land.
My favourite fictional father is yet another single dad – a man who walks his son through the grey grimness of a dystopian world, desperately determined that the boy survive. Read The Road this weekend, as a tribute to author Cormac McCarthy who passed away earlier this week, as a love song for Father’s Day, and as a cautionary tale in this age of climate change. Or cast these considerations aside and simply read The Road for its pared down and poetic prose – here’s a peek for you-
In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while, he fell back and after a while, the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.
But let us move beyond single dads to other kinds of fictional fathers.
Here, this week, for your reading pleasure, are five family sagas with their fathers. Set across continents, each of these fictional fathers (much like our real-life ones) impact the narratives of their families in weighty ways.
Book 1 of 5: Fathers Who Cultivate and Heal
It’s the beginning of the twentieth century in the coastal state of Kerala, when a 12- year-old girl leaves her family behind, to be married to a 40-year-old widower, a man she will grow to love as she watches him work hard on the 500 acres of estate he owns. Their family, like others in this story, struggle against medical disasters, accepting their fates, even as they work slowly towards progress. The fathers in the world of The Covenant of Water are strivers, sometimes enabling strong women such as Big Ammachi, other times pushing them away as with Philipose and Elsie. Despite these differences, they remain steadfastly committed to preserving their patrimony, as they tend to the land, and work on healing the community. If they blunder, it is because they fail to examine the past, from a genetic and sociological point of view. The novel’s biggest learning is that one needs to understand the mental makeup of one’s father, quite literally, in order to solve the problems of the present.
Book 2 of 5: Primary Caregiver Dads
This historical fiction set on Jeju island, off the coast of Korea, tells the story of the haenyos – women who are free divers, who make their livelihood from collecting sea abalones, conches, octopuses etc even as the men stay behind to take care of the children. The women learn how to survive in the sea, to swim as a team; they have a fierce sense of independence and of agency. The dads in contrast are mostly shadowy except for Jun-bu, the gentle schoolteacher and Sang-Mun, the villain who collaborates with the Japanese. The world of The Island of Sea Women is a vanishing one; it is sad but true, that for all the enterprise and initiative of the haenyeo, it is the male forces of history, captured in the stand off between these two dads, that propels many of the inevitable developments in this novel.
Book 3 of 5: The Desolation of Absent Dads
A repressive state can exact a cruel toll on generations and you see this in this family saga set in Tbilisi, Georgia. The fathers in The Eighth Life are drained, simply trying to survive, to decide whether to rebel or to collaborate, to go to war and be killed or to desert and risk being captured and tortured. It is women like Stasia and Christine, who must battle life, and someone makes it through. But it is their descendants, girls like Kitty, Lene and Niza, who pay the ultimate price, finding themselves carrying the unresolved intergenerational trauma of their tortured fathers. The Eighth Life was first written in German, by Georgian-born Nino Haratischwili – it has since been translated into English and been an instant bestseller. At 935 pages, it is a long book, yet it bursts with flavour and is totally compelling and unputdownable.
Book 4 of 5: Fathers who favour one child
Read East of Eden for the powerful way it captures the spirit of the American pioneers, making the dry and dusty Salinas Valley come to life. This family saga is an easy and enthralling read, even though it’s complex, with many layers, including a retelling of the Cain and Abel story. What comes through most powerfully for me, is how a father’s preference for one child, has a cataclysmic impact on entire generations. Here’s a small sampling of sibling rivalry, between the two half-brothers Adam and Charles –
‘Look at his birthday!” Charles shouted. “I took six bits, and I bought him a knife made in Germany—three blades and a corkscrew, pearl-handled. Where’s that knife? Do you ever see him use it?
What did you do on his birthday? You think I didn’t see? Did you spend six bits or even four bits? You brought him a mongrel pup you picked up in the woodlot. That dog sleeps in his room.’
Book 5 of 5: The Power of Surrogate Fathers
Surely there is no one as romantic as the Irish Catholic priest Ralph de Bricassart, I thought, as I read The Thorn Birds in my teenage years. Today when I think about this family saga set in Australia, I feel very differently – a good-looking priest tellingly referred to a ‘Father’, stepping in to be a surrogate father to a young teenager, sweeping her off her feet, abandoning her for his priestly ambitions, leaving her unmoored for life – how morally questionable is this power of a surrogate father?
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Dear Reader,
When I think about literary dads, it’s the single fathers I think about.
Like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird who inspires his children by example. And Abel from Kane and Abel who brings up his daughter Florentyna to dream big, to start a business empire and run for the highest office in the land.
My favourite fictional father is yet another single dad – a man who walks his son through the grey grimness of a dystopian world, desperately determined that the boy survive. Read The Road this weekend, as a tribute to author Cormac McCarthy who passed away earlier this week, as a love song for Father’s Day, and as a cautionary tale in this age of climate change. Or cast these considerations aside and simply read The Road for its pared down and poetic prose – here’s a peek for you-
In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while, he fell back and after a while, the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.
But let us move beyond single dads to other kinds of fictional fathers.
Here, this week, for your reading pleasure, are five family sagas with their fathers. Set across continents, each of these fictional fathers (much like our real-life ones) impact the narratives of their families in weighty ways.
Book 1 of 5: Fathers Who Cultivate and Heal
It’s the beginning of the twentieth century in the coastal state of Kerala, when a 12- year-old girl leaves her family behind, to be married to a 40-year-old widower, a man she will grow to love as she watches him work hard on the 500 acres of estate he owns. Their family, like others in this story, struggle against medical disasters, accepting their fates, even as they work slowly towards progress. The fathers in the world of The Covenant of Water are strivers, sometimes enabling strong women such as Big Ammachi, other times pushing them away as with Philipose and Elsie. Despite these differences, they remain steadfastly committed to preserving their patrimony, as they tend to the land, and work on healing the community. If they blunder, it is because they fail to examine the past, from a genetic and sociological point of view. The novel’s biggest learning is that one needs to understand the mental makeup of one’s father, quite literally, in order to solve the problems of the present.
Book 2 of 5: Primary Caregiver Dads
This historical fiction set on Jeju island, off the coast of Korea, tells the story of the haenyos – women who are free divers, who make their livelihood from collecting sea abalones, conches, octopuses etc even as the men stay behind to take care of the children. The women learn how to survive in the sea, to swim as a team; they have a fierce sense of independence and of agency. The dads in contrast are mostly shadowy except for Jun-bu, the gentle schoolteacher and Sang-Mun, the villain who collaborates with the Japanese. The world of The Island of Sea Women is a vanishing one; it is sad but true, that for all the enterprise and initiative of the haenyeo, it is the male forces of history, captured in the stand off between these two dads, that propels many of the inevitable developments in this novel.
Book 3 of 5: The Desolation of Absent Dads
A repressive state can exact a cruel toll on generations and you see this in this family saga set in Tbilisi, Georgia. The fathers in The Eighth Life are drained, simply trying to survive, to decide whether to rebel or to collaborate, to go to war and be killed or to desert and risk being captured and tortured. It is women like Stasia and Christine, who must battle life, and someone makes it through. But it is their descendants, girls like Kitty, Lene and Niza, who pay the ultimate price, finding themselves carrying the unresolved intergenerational trauma of their tortured fathers. The Eighth Life was first written in German, by Georgian-born Nino Haratischwili – it has since been translated into English and been an instant bestseller. At 935 pages, it is a long book, yet it bursts with flavour and is totally compelling and unputdownable.
Book 4 of 5: Fathers who favour one child
Read East of Eden for the powerful way it captures the spirit of the American pioneers, making the dry and dusty Salinas Valley come to life. This family saga is an easy and enthralling read, even though it’s complex, with many layers, including a retelling of the Cain and Abel story. What comes through most powerfully for me, is how a father’s preference for one child, has a cataclysmic impact on entire generations. Here’s a small sampling of sibling rivalry, between the two half-brothers Adam and Charles –
‘Look at his birthday!” Charles shouted. “I took six bits, and I bought him a knife made in Germany—three blades and a corkscrew, pearl-handled. Where’s that knife? Do you ever see him use it?
What did you do on his birthday? You think I didn’t see? Did you spend six bits or even four bits? You brought him a mongrel pup you picked up in the woodlot. That dog sleeps in his room.’
Book 5 of 5: The Power of Surrogate Fathers
Surely there is no one as romantic as the Irish Catholic priest Ralph de Bricassart, I thought, as I read The Thorn Birds in my teenage years. Today when I think about this family saga set in Australia, I feel very differently – a good-looking priest tellingly referred to a ‘Father’, stepping in to be a surrogate father to a young teenager, sweeping her off her feet, abandoning her for his priestly ambitions, leaving her unmoored for life – how morally questionable is this power of a surrogate father?
Enjoy unlimited digital access with HT Premium
Subscribe Now to continue reading
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