The Eternal Son

by Cristovão Tezza

Translated from the original Portuguese by Alison Entrekin

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.

(From Publisher).

Cristovão Tezza, one of Brazil’s foremost contemporary novelists, was born in 1952. He has published thirteen novels, including O Filho Eterno (The Eternal Son), which won every major literary prize in Brazil in 2008 and has been translated into seven languages. He was also the recipient of the Brazilian National Library Award in 1998 and the Brazilian Academy of Letters Award in 2004.
Additionally, he taught Portuguese at the Federal University of Paraná, and has published textbooks and articles in a number of magazines and newspapers. He is presently working on a book of short stories. Tezza lives in Curitiba, in the south of Brazil.

This novel gained the author all the major award in Portuguese language. It has been translated into English, Italian, French and Dutch. Tezzo confronts us with this far from a moral journey, not avoiding the uncomfortable opportunities to make us appalled by its cruel honesty, the very cleverness of this compelling book.

Writing about a father who has a child with Down's Syndrome, is a courageous and disturbing choice. Controversial feelings like fear, shame, insecurity, weakness, strength, dreams and love all come together in the person. This is a strong novel in which personal and temporal references of the author mix with a fictional register. This is a well written book that goes beyond reality, and which transforms literature in a social sense.