Years Like Brief Days (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works: European)

Years Like Brief Days is the latest novel by one of Costa Rica's most celebrated writers, Fabian Dobles, and the first to be translated into English.
An elderly man decides to revisit the village where he grew up. He drives there in his old van, and so begins a nostalgic journey in which memories of his boyhood and his earliest sexual experiences are vividly evoked by scents and sounds and sights.
After driving home he begins to write the letter he had failed to write to his mother during her lifetime. He tells her sadly but sometimes humorously of the solitary and shameful life he led when his father, the village doctor, placed him in a seminary to study for the priesthood. In episodes both farcical and painful he describes how the mental and physical abuse he experiences there cause him to reject his training and question his faith.
In the coda to the novel, the old man takes his wife to the valley of their youth. Together they reminisce, and slowly the man comes to forgive the father who, for all his severity, taught him more about personal and professional integrity than anyone else in his life.