The Eternal Son

Winner, São Paulo Art Critics’ Association Award for that year’s best work of fiction, the Jabuti Prize, the Bravo! Award, the Portugal–Telecom Award, the São Paulo Literature Award, and the Zaffari & Bourbon Award, all for best novel or work of fiction

In this multi-award-winning autobiographical novel, Cristovão Tezza draws his readers into the mind of a young father whose son, Felipe, is born with Down syndrome. From the initial shock of diagnosis, and through his growing understanding of the world of hospitals and therapies, Tezza threads the story of his son’s life with his own.

Felipe, who lives in an eternal present, becomes a remarkable young man; for Tezza, however, the story is a settling of accounts with himself and his own limitations and, ultimately, a coming to terms with the sublime ironies and arbitrariness of life. He struggles with the phantom of shame, as if his son’s condition were an indication of his own worth, and yearns for a ‘normal’ world that is always out of reach.

Reading this compelling book is like stumbling through a trap door into the writer’s mind, where nothing is censored, and everything is constantly examined and reinterpreted. What emerges is a hard-won philosophy of everyday life.

It is extraordinary to encounter a common human drama — the birth of a disabled child — investigated profoundly by a father who happens to be a gifted writer. The Eternal Son is an honest and insightful story by one of Brazil’s foremost contemporary novelists, here beautifully translated by Alison Entrekin. It is world literature at its finest.