Returning From The Underground

Years after the death of his father—who in the 1970s sacrificed everything in pursuit of his ideals, and joined the underground guerilla army in Mexico—the narrator and his younger brother try to piece together the fragments of their family history. The narration takes us through a wrenching journey of reconstructing past and memory, family love and abandonment, all amidst the historical moment of dirty war.

Fritz Glockner takes us into the astonishing testimony of a family touched by the dirty war, and their moving relationship with a father who is gone, then tortured and imprisoned, then freed and finally assassinated. Returning from the Underground is a profound reflection about love and forgiveness, that brings together the virtues of testimony and, at the same time, it enters into the very conflictive field of family love, father-son relationships and more importantly, relationships of absence, identity and loss.

Above all, this novel is an indirect story, a testimony, that allows readers to learn a bit about the Mexican dirty war of the 1970s. It gives a voice to a history seldom spoken about: a horrifying dirty war that brought a few hundred idealists to the urgent decision of having to change the course of a nation in the quickest and most desperate way. This, in the face of a system with a great capacity for evil; a repressive system capable of torture, assassinations, the shooting at cribs and the killing innocence in its sleep.  The full story of this historical period has not been told. It’s a story to which, it seems, the nation has applied self-censorship. It is a story that awaits for the day when criminals can be brought to trial for their crimes.