Half-forgotten Things: Vignettes from a Life - a Memoir

Publisher Marketing: Half-Forgotten Things focuses on the Aberasturis, a prominent Spanish Basque family in Malitbog, a town in Southern Leyte, the Philippines. The memoir opens as Txomin Aberasturi returns to his hometown for a visit after a long absence. From the landscape, memories arise and are vividly recounted. We become familiar with the family's successful shipping and export business. We are presented with anecdotes of family adventures, which touch a universal human chord. When Txomin is eight years old, Pearl Harbor is bombed and life on the Philippines, and everywhere else, changes dramatically. There are many memorable characters depicted in this book, with traits to remind us of personalities encountered in our own lives. One of these is the American captain who organize s the guerrilla movement in Leyte during the Second World War, falls in love with Txomin's beautiful cousin. Their story is the basis of the book, and later the movie, An American Guerilla in the Philippines, starring Tyrone Power. The most compelling portrait in the book is that of the author's father, a man of overwhelming integrity, a hero to his son and to the reader. Txomin's father, Dionisio Aberasturi, a Basque from Vizcaya, Spain, at the hub of this memoir, is defined by his unshakable uprightness, all the more remarkable because they are not fictional. Two sisters of the author are at a boarding school in Spain when the Spanish Civil War breaks out. After the war, the author works hard alongside his father until he goes off to college. While he is away, his father dies in a tragic accident and Txomin returns for the funeral. The absence of his father is as palpable as his presence always was. The reader is swept with the enormous emptiness he leaves. Txomin Aberasturi was an engineer. He worked as a math teacher and later managed a bulk plant for Mobil Oil in the Philippines. He died in New York in 2007. Nilda Aberasturi lives in New York, has finished a novel and is working on another book. This is the authors' first literary work."