"I slept almost four hours straight, dreamlessly, until I was awakened at seven by the knot of grief in my belly at the death of my son Jacobo, which we’d scheduled for seven that night, Portland time, ten o’clock in New York."

By the time the first very short chapter (there are 33 of them and the first is the shortest) closes with this sentence, we know that the narrator, David, is in New York and not in Portland and we know that most of the family is there with him while Jacobo and his brother Pablo are making their way to Portland. So why is Jacobo scheduled to die, why is it happening away from home and why is the family not with him?

Instead of relying on alternating chapters, Tomás González uses alternating paragraphs in most of his chapters to jump around the timeline. The here and now is a small Colombian village, La Mesa de Juan Díaz, in 2018. But that time shares the spotlight with New York in 1999 on the day his son died and we get glimpses of other times in David's life.

In 2018, David is a widower, living alone and employing a local family to help him after having lost his wife Sara 2 years earlier and now slowly starting to loose his eyesight. He still gets visitors and his sons and friends call often but he is nevertheless alone. In 1999, he was a successful painter, with a loving wife, 3 sons and a circle of friends.

Unable to paint anymore due to the damage to his eyes, the old man takes to writing and starts a memoir. What we read is a mix between the memoir and his current thoughts, without separators and without indication of which part belongs to what. It feels a bit disjointed at first but when the rhythm settles, it starts feeling like the thought of a man in his later years - now he thinks about his housekeeper, now he is back in time with his dead wife.

It is a story of grief and loss - the grief of losing a child, the grief of losing a wife, the grief of losing your eyesight when you had made beauty and the visual arts your life. David's voice is melancholic and as he is telling the story of the life he lived, he is able to see and appreciate the things he could have done better. But under it all runs the inevitable - Jacobo always dies, Sara can never come back and even the doctors are surprised with the rapid loss of his eyesight. And yet, it never feels hopeless and part of it is David's attitude to life and its surprises, all the way to that last sentence which he cannot even write himself anymore and needs someone else to write and yet it summarizes his life: "Wunderful!" (creative spelling fully intended - read the novella/short novel to learn why). ( )