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by Héctor Abad
His biggest book since Oblivion, Héctor Abad's humane voice buoys the spirit and reminds us of the value of human connection and the power of art.
Luis Cordóba, also known as Gordo, leads an unconventional life. His vocation as a priest has not stopped him from becoming a film critic, teacher, opera enthusiast, and passionate nibbler of chocolate and pepperoni. He lives in his childhood home in downtown Medellín with another priest, Aurelio Sánchez, or Lelo, among a slew of pets (war-mongering fish, a toucan, and parakeets aren't the half of it). It is Lelo who shades in these details, writing across time to the day in 1996 when life changed. At fifty, Gordo learns he needs a heart transplant. He is forbidden from climbing stairs, and so he moves into a different neighborhood with a friend, her housekeeper, and their children. With the briskness of sunshine drying out wet clothes, and air rushing through and renewing old places, Lelo reflects on Gordo's new era of thinking and feeling.
Luis Cordóba is inspired by the life of the priest and film critic Luis Alberto Alvarez, a friend of Héctor Abad's, and an important figure in Colombian cultural spheres. To keep Aside from My Heart, All is Well from becoming a biography, Abad drew on a range of sources to conjure up Cordóba, a person who both is and is not Alberto Alvarez.
"A mesmerizing chronicle of Luis Cordóba, an opera-loving priest and film critic ... Abad offers a remarkable depiction of the harmony sustained in the priests' secular interests and spiritual devotion ... An immersive and affecting tale." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The heart of the title ... alludes to the ailing organ of the protagonist, Luis Córdoba, who is awaiting a transplant. It also acts as a cultural symbol, a seat of the feelings, emotions, and passions that are deliberately spread throughout the work, leading it toward a powerful vitalist plea in which the beauty of existence and the ethic of caring for others prevail over monstrosity and moral abjection." —El País
"Aside from My Heart, All is Well tells the story of characters who speak to us about what truly matters. Their naturalness and generosity stay with us. We continue to speak to them." —Latin American Literature Today
This information about Aside from My Heart, All is Well was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Héctor Abad was born in Medellín, Colombia in 1958. At the age of twenty-one, Abad won the Colombian National Short Story Prize, and has twice won the Símon Bolívar Prize for journalism. In 1987, his father was murdered by Colombian paramilitaries, an event he reflected on 20 years later in Oblivion: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), which earned widespread critical acclaim as well as the WOLA-Duke Book Award. After his father's death, Abad was forced into exile, moving first to Spain and then to Italy. He studied Modern Languages and Literature at the University of Turin. His translations from the Italian include works by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Umberto Eco. Abad's books have been translated into more than fifteen languages, including Anne McLean's translation of The Farm, which Archipelago published in 2018.
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