Retrospective

Sergio Cabrera, a Colombian film director, travels to Barcelona for a retrospective of his work at a moment when his life is unraveling. His father, the well-known actor Fausto Cabrera, has just died, his marriage is failing, and back home Colombia has rejected peace accords that might have ended a war lasting more than fifty years. Over a handful of demanding days while his films are screened, Sergio looks back on the episodes that shaped his family, above all those involving his father, his sister Marianella, and himself.

As the children of famous performers, Sergio and Marianella grew up in Colombia with privilege and an artistic upbringing. Their parents, however, grew disillusioned with middle-class conventions and moved the whole family to China during Mao's Cultural Revolution. They lived in a hotel housing only foreign residents, learned Chinese, took part in the revolution, joined the Red Guard, and trained as guerrilla fighters. Later they returned to Colombia to support the revolutionary cause there. They were sent into the countryside to join a guerrilla force, came under fire, and barely survived.

Sergio eventually broke away from the movement, and his second life as an artist grew out of the same convictions that had consumed his family. He became his country's most acclaimed film director. The novel moves from the Spanish Civil War and the family's exile to Latin America to the Cultural Revolution in China and the guerrilla movements of 1960s Colombia. Its people and events are based on real life.

Part family saga and part sweeping historical novel, Retrospective follows one man and his family while examining the ideological forces that reshaped their lives over half a century.