Between the Real-Biographical and Fiction: Autobiofiction in "El olvido que seremos" by Héctor Abad Faciolince

Abstract

This article analyzes the book El olvido que seremos by Colombian author Héctor Abad Faciolince, published in 2005 by Editorial Planeta. After an account of the theory of the “writings of self” and the autofiction, it is argued that the narrative structure falls under the category of autobiofiction proposed by Manuel Alberca in his book El pacto ambiguo. De la novela autobiográfica a la autoficción (2007) due to the author’s use of his own experience, his life, and the experience of others to write fiction, and also due to the strain between the boundaries of genres like autobiography and novel, which indissolubly mix the real-biographical with the fictional to foster uncertainty in the reader. Likewise, it is proposed that the irruption of fiction in the real-biographical allows the author to take the place of the parent in order to reconstruct and experience firsthand the murder of his father, an experience he did not live. Finally, it is pointed out that the transgressions of the narrative perspective give the work a polyphonic nature that allows the different voices present in the text to reconstruct, in a fragmented way, a collective memory.