Review: One Last Song For My Father by Edwin Fontánez

An elegant elegy for an imperfect man, Edwin Fontánez’s One Last Song For My Father: A Son’s Memoir is a gorgeous blend of alliterative prose, lyrical poetry, and lush metaphoric writing.

Growing up in Puerto Rico, author Fontánez always struggled with his often neglectful and financially irresponsible father, Modesto. A tinsmith metalworker who dropped out of school before the third grade, Modesto enjoyed playing music with friends in his spare time, but his alcoholism left his family in a constant state of impoverishment. Fontánez resented his father’s lack of empathy, particularly for his mother, but his dad did have a softer side: his love of dogs, the way he bonded with Fontánez’s school friends, and the care he took when playing music for elderly people at a retirement home.

After leaving home to study art and moving to New York, Fontánez gained enough of a distance from his father to be able to reconsider his life and legacy. Unfortunately, Modesto was soon afterward diagnosed with dementia, a disease that sadly stole the last sixteen years of his life, as well as his memories. This memoir is Edwin Fontánez’s empathetic way of honoring a father who he lost to illness long before his actual death, piecing together his father’s life in a way that his father no longer could.

The book not only chronicles Modesto’s life and times, but also the experiences of other family members, as Fontánez lovingly recalls his father’s parents – his musical grandfather, and his hardworking stoic grandmother – and their unique Blue House. He also recounts his mother’s story, a striking house cleaner who was married at the young age of eighteen. Fontánez deftly fills the void of his father’s absence by committing Modesto’s world to memory, one person at a time.

Place plays an enormous role in the memoir, with memories of the beautiful island of Puerto Rico looming large over the narrative. Fontánez’s stunning descriptions of the native flora and fauna of the mountains and countryside set the reader firmly in his world, as nature and geography are often used to smartly reflect the events of the story. For example, Fontánez sees his mother for the last time on the day of a solar eclipse, and he seamlessly links these two occurrences together through his expressive prose.

Perhaps most impressive are Fontánez’s disquisitions on the importance of art, and the nature of time. Visual art heavily influences the text, as Fontánez is an oil painter; his works, as well as black-and-white family photographs, illustrate the book, alongside poetic interludes. In his adult years, Fontánez came to recognize his father’s own perfectionism in himself as indicative of an artist’s personality, and while Modesto was not necessarily a gifted musician, his love of the art form had no bounds. Even when Modesto began to lose his sense of time to dementia, he continued to hold onto his musical joy until the end.

All told, One Last Song For My Father is a momentous achievement – a tender catalog of the memory of a man who no longer had memories of his own, which his son lovingly constructs, while setting aside their differences. It is a dynamic that many will find intimately relatable whether or not dementia plays a part in their own relationship with family. Fontánez not only does his father justice, but has crafted a uniquely emotive and well-written memoir in the process.