The Fall: A Father's Memoir in 424 Steps

The step. The march. Move by move, meter by meter, one of the most controversial commentators on Brazilian reality learned to measure happiness, success. In the uncertain strides of his firstborn, Tito, who was born with cerebral palsy, Diogo Mainardi counts the hours, his own accomplishments. In *The Fall*, he counts much more: each of his son's victories, each distance covered before treacherous muscles throw him to the ground. In this powerful memoir, Mainardi strips away all his beliefs and orientations—political or otherwise—to reveal himself simply as a father. So intrinsically in love with his own son, so emotionally in tune with his boy, that he makes us feel almost like voyeurs of an unconditional and irrevocable love. Partners in a story as moving as it is surprising. Like the repercussions of a stone thrown into a lake—ripples radiating from a single point—Mainardi always returns to the Venice hospital where Tito, the victim of a gross medical error, was born. In an intricate minuet with the reader, he returns and advances in time. And he constructs a web of coincidences that seems to have determined Tito's fate long before his birth. With gentleness and courage, Mainardi also reveals the years of successful and unsuccessful therapies, details of the lawsuit against the doctor and the hospital, and the relationship with guilt and the guilty parties.