October 2019
Vaderliefde
by P.F. Thomése
P.F. Thomése’s parents are dead, and the remnants of their lives are packed up in a few boxes in the attic. The writer realises that his father and mother were, in a way, like a couple of strangers, constantly putting on a show for him. His father used to tell him countless stories in the semi-darkness before bedtime. But he did not utter a single word about his heart-stopping experiences in the Second World War. His mother never talked about herself at all, yet her untold stories are perhaps the most beautiful of all those to be found in Fatherly Love. The ‘left-behind son’ posthumously discovers a wealth of hidden histories and magnificent fictions, with the horrible truth inevitably somewhere in between. Gathered together, the ‘lost lives’ of his parents and ancestors undoubtedly constitute a family saga, but above all, Fatherly Love can be read as the mythology of a childhood.
