Years after the death of his father--who in the 1970s sacrificed everything in pursuit of his ideals, and joined the underground guerilla army in Mexico--the narrator and his younger brother try to piece together the fragments of their family history. The narration takes us through a wrenching journey of reconstructing past and memory, family love and abandonment, all amidst the historical moment of dirty war.
Fritz Glockner takes us into the astonishing testimony of a family touched by the dirty war, and their moving relationship with a father who is gone, then tortured and imprisoned, then freed and finally assassinated. Returning from the Underground is a profound reflection about love and forgiveness, that brings together the virtues of testimony and, at the same time, it enters into the very conflictive field of family love, father-son relationships and more importantly, relationships of absence, identity and loss.
Above all, this novel is an indirect story, a testimony, that allows readers to learn a bit about the Mexican dirty war of the 1970s. It gives a voice to a history seldom spoken about: a horrifying dirty war that brought a few hundred idealists to the urgent decision of having to change the course of a nation in the quickest and most desperate way. This, in the face of a system with a great capacity for evil; a repressive system capable of torture, assassinations, the shooting at cribs and the killing innocence in its sleep. The full story of this historical period has not been told. It's a story to which, it seems, the nation has applied self-censorship. It is a story that awaits for the day when criminals can be brought to trial for their crimes.
Fritz Glockner takes us into the astonishing testimony of a family touched by the dirty war, and their moving relationship with a father who is gone, then tortured and imprisoned, then freed and finally assassinated. He also takes us into a profound reflection about love and forgiveness. [Returning from the Under-ground is] A little, great novel, indispensable for the unders-tanding of the dirty war of the 1970s.
Vicente Leñero
Returning from the Underground brings together the virtues of testimony and at the same time it enters into a very conflictive field, the field of family love, father-son relationships, and more importantly relationships of absence. Add to that one of the most aggravating elements, the political multiplier: the history of the guerilla, the dirty war, the disappearances. It’s prickly material and I think it’s a very difficult book, yet it’s well resolved. Very difficult, well resolved, because you absorb the interference with the purely personal.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
