Father And I

The story spans nearly a hundred years. In Carlo Gebler's early childhood, his relationship with his father, Ernest, was a disaster. A man of the left, Ernest's politics had been 'hammered out in the nineteen thirties'. His early life as the son of a Jewish immigrant was spent working as a rat catcher in a cinema, snatching moments alone to educate himself, but the one with the literary talent was his second wife, Edna O'Brien - Gebler's mother - who left after Ernest claimed authorship of her work. As his father saw it, Carlo and his brother Sasha were over-fed members of the bourgeoisie, and toys and sweets were banned from their lonely childhood, filled with memories of abuse and neglect. Years later, on hearing his estranged father was now senile, Gebler made the journey to southern Ireland and through his past, through diaries that confirmed Ernest's hatred for his sons, yet also revealed the abuse Ernest in turn suffered as a young man, a life of extreme poverty and the abandonment of his first wife. This not a story that ends in hate; by the time Carlo Gebler reached their final years together, he no longer felt the anger that had dogged their relationship.

The literary world has hardly been short of writers' recollections of their parents in recent years, but they don't come much better than Carlo Gebler's account of his relationship with his father ... This is a marvellous book, beautifully capturing the bewilderment and betrayals of childhood, as well as the shifting perspectives of adulthood. At times unbearably sad, at others ludicrously funny, it is written with great honesty and charm, A sparse, lean, haunting account ... Written with Gebler's trademark no-frills prose, and relentless attention to the detail of a child's life as it is lived, this memoir also provides a vivid evocation of Britain and Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, Father & I is more than worthy to share shelf space with such acknowledged masterpieces of the genre as Edmund Gosse's Father and Son and J.R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself, A book of great merit ... Gebler's is a strong authorial voice, unsentimental and unabashed. The humanity of the author comes through and we begin to share his compassion for his father ... highly recommendable

Carlo Gebler is the author of several novels and two works of non-fiction. He co-produced and directed the acclaimed BBC2 series PLAIN TALES FROM NORTHERN IRELAND and the recent A LITTLE LOCAL DIFFICULTY.