Agustín Fernández Mallo
Editorial: Six Barral
Year of publication: 2024
To Agustín Fernández Mallo and his father they are united by cows. Or the memory of them, rather. Let’s give you some background because saying this doesn’t make much sense:
Year 1967. Fernández Mallo’s father, a veterinarian, traveled to the United States. To the vast prairies of Kansas and Missouri to select cows and bring them to Galicia by plane. He wrote about that trip in a diary. He brought with him 20 cattle. It happened a month before the author of this book was born. Decades later, Agustín himself was in the United States, traveling the country from New York to Los Angeles.
Passing through Kansas, hundreds of cows stared at him. That’s where the germ of this book was born.
Passing through Kansas, as his father once did, in a very large meadow, hundreds of cows stared at him. That’s where the germ of this book was born. That unexpected meeting took place in 2010. Agustín’s father suffered from cognitive degeneration associated with old age and at that time, he was often unable to recognize his son or only partially recognized him. He was sick.
That coincidence made the writer think a lot. Seeing the death of his father so closely, the idea occurred to him that one day I might write about him. That “someday” is today.
With Pink Floyd in memory
That memory of the United States joins with another that gives the title to this book. That Atomic heart mother is the translation of Atom heart mother, a disk of pink floyd on whose cover there is a cow looking at the camera. He ended up at the Fernández Mallo house when Agustín was 8 years old. Upon seeing him, his father completely ignored the group and the music. Focused only on the cow to explain to her son everything about her: the breed, what she feeds on, the type of milk she gives…
‘Mother with an atomic heart’ weaves passages from the life of the Fernández Mallo family through the figure of their father
Agustín’s father always noticed things that the rest left aside. And this has ended up being transferred to a book that is like a chest from which dozens of stories come out that are told to us from a very different point of view than the average mortal would.
Atomic heart mother weaves passages from the life of the Fernández Mallo family through the figure of their father. Since how Augustine’s grandparents They survived the Civil War and the complicated post-war period to the present, passing through the moment in which, after seeing the herd of cows in Kansas and knowing that his father had little time left and that his memory was being lost, Agustín himself tried to relive that trip from the late 60s as an attempt so that the memory of his father would not die with him.
Go through life clean
Death is a theme that twists and turns at the core of this book and never quite leaves it. But He does not treat it as an end, but as a beginning. Because as Agustín Fernández Mallo captures in the pages of this text, once the person dies, a new one is created with the memory you have left of her.
This is one hallmark of this author’s literature. Look at everything from another prism. It’s nice to think that when your loved ones die they don’t leave, they stay with you. They are resurrected in your head in a different way. It’s not them anymore. They are the version of them that you have created. They are a new person who lives in you, the last lesson that a loved one leaves us.
the same world
With this book, Mallo also wants to capture the idea that You do not have to be afraidneither to live, nor to die, nor to take a plane carrying twenty cows.
With this book, Mallo also wants to express the idea that there is no need to be afraid
We live in a world in which overprotection is increasingly pronounced. Agustín’s father left him free to grow although, as he recognizes within this book, she was also his support and he was always present. But he was never afraid nor did he convey it to him.
A figure so capital that it has caused Agustín Fernández Mallo to become emotionally naked. He has shared with us what the death of one of the most important people in his life meant to him. A memory that will always be yours but that, from today, is also a little bit of ours.
