• The Farm
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Archipelago Books

The Farm

The Farm

by Héctor Abad, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

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Available as E-Book Latin American Literature
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Pilar, Eva, and Antonio Ángel are the last heirs of La Oculta, a farm hidden in the mountains of Colombia. The land provides the setting for the siblings' happiest memories, but it also reminds them of their struggle against the siege of violence and terror, restlessness and flight. In The Farm, Héctor Abad illuminates the vicissitudes of a family and a people, as well as the voices of these three siblings, recounting their loves, fears, desires, and hopes, all against a dazzling backdrop. We enter their lives at the moment they are about to lose the paradise on which they built their dreams and reality.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9780914671923
Pages: 375
Publication Date:

Praise

Héctor Abad’s The Farm is about how three adult children deal with inheriting a paternal farm...The love for manicured landscapes and sumptuous greenhouses—on display throughout Abad’s novel—offers many a lesson about the barbarity in civilization, in the South and the North, that emerge when reading between the lines.
—Héctor Abad, Public Books

Building on his well-received memoir, Oblivion...the Colombian writer Abad tells a family story in The Farm, a novel that deploys the tragic events of his country’s history as background...Pilar stands out for her delicate and memorable turns of phrase.
—Patricio Pron, The New York Times

The novel progresses through rings of memory, love, nostalgia, incrimination, judgment, and desire as the three siblings contemplate their attachment to La Oculta in successive first-person chapters. Mirrored so as to reflect one another, the glossy, dark, and quiet rings form and swirl out as if produced by a pebble thrown into the farm’s deep nameless lake... Abad’s skill in The Farm, and a reason he is one of Colombia’s most magnetic writers, is the capacity to embody the pebble, positioning himself in the center of rippling circles in order to appreciate the force from every surrounding point. For the English reader, translator Anne McLean enhances Abad’s radical centrism by successfully modulating the tone of each sibling to keep their voices distinct while also revealing interior emotional range, contradiction, and confusion.
—Nathaniel Popkin, Rain Taxi Review

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