This object, a novel, a letter, a self-realisation project, a final reckoning, a murder and a rebirth, a documentation, a work of art, an interactive gravestone… redemption, at last.
When Glenn is five years old and his younger brother, René, is three, their father commits suicide. In the void left by this incomprehensible loss, the family is shaped by a succession of men who move in and out of their lives.
Deconstructing the enormous, destructive power unleashed by suicide, Glenn Bech attempts to find a language for a past that refuses to be remembered. Through fragments of poetry, letters, and home-video transcripts, The Fathership is a brutal and dazzling work of social realism that stretches the definitions of autofiction to breaking point; a sorrowful and furious documentation of a family in crisis and a psychological search for a father known only through his absence.