From dyslexic to writer there is an abyss. Or so it might seem if we stick to the official definitions of this cognitive impairment that obfuscates everything that affects written language.
But the human brain is, along with the abyssal depths, the most hidden space yet to be discovered in this world of ours. Richard Ford it is one of the most obvious examples. Being slow to read gave Ford the virtue of greater observance of what was written, a greater scrupulousness that made him a detailed storyteller in all respects.
Before being a writer, Richard Ford was a young rebel. Without his father figure, and with his mother necessarily devoted to her work to raise the family forward back in the 50s, Richard indulged in juvenile delinquency, from which, fortunately for literature, he emerged unscathed.
If you survive the worst in yourself, you may one day bring out the best that you harbor. It sounds like a quote from Confucius, but it is the demonstrable reality in the case of Ford. Problematic and with learning disabilities, but little by little he discovered that he had something interesting to do in this world, and he was accompanied by the right person to do it, his wife Kristina.
3 Recommended Novels by Richard Ford
Independence Day
Some say that Frank Bascombe is the unmistakable alter ego of Richard Ford, his birthplace and other clues make it possible. Regardless of whether the vital story of this character has more or less in common with the author, his truth, that which makes the character shine, which makes him unforgettable, stands out greatly in the case of the singular Frank Bascombe.
In this novel the author turned to him once more. And it was probably the best stage where he was able to present it and make it shine.
Synopsis: On Independence Day, Richard Ford recovers Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of The Sports Journalist. It is the summer of 1988, Frank is still living in Haddam, New Jersey, but now he is in the real estate business and, after the divorce, he is romantically involved with another woman, Sally.
While looking for a house for some unbearable clients, Frank looks forward to the arrival of the weekend of July 4, Independence Day, which is going to happen in the company of Paul, his troubled teenage son. Ford takes up his antihero and launches him on a new daily adventure, in which desolation, melancholy, humor and hope intermingle.
Sports journalist
Sport reflects our desires and frustrations, the justices and injustices of the world, passion, love and hate. Sport as a spectacle today is already the literature of our own life.
Many athletes throw stereotypes nonstop ... and that is why it is always better to read about the sport and its meaning to a writer like Ford. Sporting glory is fleeting, today's winner. And in the long run it can end up eating you from the inside when in a future day the memory of that glory is almost foreign to you. The paradox of life itself.
Synopsis: Frank Bascombe is thirty-eight years old and has a magnificent future as a writer behind him. He enjoyed a brief moment of glory, after the publication of a book of stories. Now he writes about sports and interviews athletes.
Writing about victories and defeats, about winners of the future or yesterday has allowed him to learn a brief lesson: «In life there are no transcendental subjects. Things happen and then they end, and that's it. " Lesson that could be applied to his fleeting fame as a writer, his brief marriage or the short life of his eldest son, Ralph, who died at the age of nine.
An implacable testimony of the inevitable disappointments, of the corrosion of ambitions, of the learning of the minimal pleasures that allow survival.
My mother
The story of Richard Ford's mother deserved this novel. Self-denial as the only formula for existence. Writing about a mother always has part of assumption, of yearning for knowledge. When a mother is not there, the questions reappear from the well in which they were abandoned like echoes.
SynopsisHer name was Edna Akin, and she was born in 1910, in a lost corner of Arkansas, a harsh land where just ten years before outlaws and robbers were part of the landscape.
Edna is the mother of Richard Ford, and the starting point of the reconstruction, between certainties and suspicions, but always with a modest and intense love, of the enigma of the family novel. And about the story of that girl whom her mother - Richard Ford's grandmother - posed as her sister when she left her husband and went to live with a much younger man.
Of that survivor who married a traveler and, before having children, lived fifteen years on the road, in a pure present. From that mother who was widowed at the age of forty-nine, she then went from one job to another to support herself and her adolescent son, and never thought that life was anything other than what she had to live ...
