Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, winner of the Biblioteca Breve Prize, is back with a harsh but beautiful settling of accounts with his father.

What do a 1300-year-old Chinese painting, the poetry of Dylan Thomas, the ethnographic research of Lévi-Strauss, a famous quote from Kafka’s diaries, and a scene from Louis Malle’s masterpiece, The Fire Within, have in common?

The answer is in a room where a man is in his death throes while his son, the author Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, looks for a revelation that might not exist in the last landscape his father laid eyes on.

Like Philip Roth in Patrimony, Amos Oz in A Story of Love and Darkness, or Peter Handke in Worst Misfortune, Ricardo Menéndez Salmón dives into the waters of his family history to explain himself through his father lights and shadows.