Years Like Brief Days

First published in 1989, Costa Rican writer Dobles's short, lyrical novel features an unnamed 70-year-old man who belatedly comes to terms with his past and with two very contradictory images of his father. In a letter he composes to his dead mother, the protagonist reveals the humiliations and punishments he endured in seminary school, where a priest sexually violated him, causing him to drop out of the school despite his parents' protests. His authoritarian, preachy father, the village doctor, at first seems a sadistic brute. He kicks and punches a horse, beats dogs with sticks and gives his children tiny hypophosphate pills laced with strychnine--heart stimulants to boost their energy during forced long walks in the countryside. Yet, when the septuagenarian and his wife revisit the valley of their youth, he recalls a very different father--an idealistic doctor who, as a medical student in New York, bravely defended a Jewish classmate from the obscene taunts of anti-Semitic students, and who embraced the African American community as a young physician in an overcrowded Harlem hospital. Dobles, whose own father was a village doctor, writes a lilting, musical prose, crafting a story by turns wistful, funny, raunchy, poignant. Its stunningly modernist technique lies in the way the protagonist's memories telescope time, mingling early childhood memories, youth, adulthood and old age in a vortex of swirling thoughts and emotions. (July)