Suffused with tenderness, Tricia Bauer’s Father Flashes is at once austere and lavish, simple and complex, troubling and serene.
Father Flashes
Tricia Bauer
2011
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-160-7
eBook
ISBN 978-1-57366-824-8
Father Flashes reimagines what the novel can be or do. Composed of stunning vignettes that capture the deterioration of a father’s mind and body, this novel provides poetic insight into the complex workings of a father-daughter relationship. As the father collapses, what appears is the daughter’s struggle to simply cope. In prose composed of intense and moving shards, Tricia Bauer delivers a revealing account of the gradual decomposition of all that is familiar and of a daughter’s gathering of memories to form the arresting collage that is Father Flashes.
Father Flashes by Tricia Bauer is a beautifully written memoir and tribute. A father’s personality, his essence, is preserved even as his disappearing is documented. These flashes linger in the reader’s mind, and all together they build the life that must have been.
Suffused with tenderness, Tricia Bauer’s Father Flashes is at once austere and lavish, simple and complex, troubling and serene. How to describe the feeling exactly? One feels in familiar territory: a parent will dim and eventually die. A child will grieve. Why then does reading Father Flashes feel so surprising — at once so natural and so frightening?