Aside from My Heart, All Is Well - Paperback

by Héctor Abad (Author), Anne McLean (Translator)

His biggest book since Oblivion, Héctor Abad's humane voice buoys the spirit and reminds us of the value of human connection and the power of art.

"Mr. Abad's prose is elastic and alive . . . [His writing] is extravagantly big-hearted."-- Dwight Garner on Oblivion, The New York Times

Luis Cordóba, also known as Gordo, leads an unconventional life. His vocation as a priest has not stopped him from becoming a film critic, teacher, opera enthusiast, and passionate nibbler of chocolate and pepperoni. He lives in his childhood home in downtown Medellín with another priest, Aurelio Sánchez, or Lelo, among a slew of pets (war-mongering fish, a toucan, and parakeets aren't the half of it). It is Lelo who shades in these details, writing across time to the day in 1996 when life changed. At fifty, Gordo learns he needs a heart transplant. He is forbidden from climbing stairs, and so he moves into a different neighborhood with a friend, her housekeeper, and their children. With the briskness of sunshine drying out wet clothes, and air rushing through and renewing old places, Lelo reflects on Gordo's new era of thinking and feeling.

Luis Cordóba is inspired by the life of the priest and film critic Luis Alberto Alvarez, a friend of Héctor Abad's, and an important figure in Colombian cultural spheres. To keep Aside from My Heart, All is Well from becoming a biography, Abad drew on a range of sources to conjure up Cordóba, a person who both is and is not Alberto Alvarez.

Author Biography

Héctor Abad was born in Medellín, Colombia in 1958. At the age of twenty-one, Abad won the Colombian National Short Story Prize, and has twice won the Símon Bolívar Prize for journalism. In 1987, his father was murdered by Colombian paramilitaries, an event he reflected on 20 years later in Oblivion: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), which earned widespread critical acclaim as well as the WOLA-Duke Book Award. After his father's death, Abad was forced into exile, moving first to Spain and then to Italy. He studied Modern Languages and Literature at the University of Turin. His translations from the Italian include works by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Umberto Eco. Abad's books have been translated into more than fifteen languages, including Anne McLean's translation of The Farm, which Archipelago published in 2018.

Anne McLean studied history in London, Ontario, and literary translation in London, England, and now lives in Toronto, where she translates Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings by authors including Héctor Abad, Javier Cercas, Julio Cortázar, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Recent translations include Until August by Gabriel García Márquez (Knopf) and a co-translation with Victor Meadowcroft of Evelio Rosero's Way Far Away (New Directions).