VILLA DOLORES

A man explores his youth and returns to his roots in this coming-of-age memoir by artist Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi.

Born to an American mother and Iranian father, Rafael Sinclair Mahdavi began life in Mexico, where his educated and unconventional parents ran a bar. From birth, he was always on the move with his parents and brother Conrad, living briefly in New York, Paris, and Long Island before heading for Mallorca in 1950, where his mother planned to write. It is their home in Mallorca that gives Sinclair Mahdavi’s memoir its title: Villa Dolores. Here readers are given a sense of endless summer and a romantic childhood, despite the adverse effects of Franco’s Fascist regime, with Sinclair Mahdavi himself writing that “Mallorca was to be my Eden with all that the name implies.” The memoir, though written chronologically and featuring reflections from the author’s current 70-year-old self, almost feels like a series of vignettes that whisk readers through Sinclair Mahdavi’s childhood and teenage years as if looking at a succession of sepia-toned photographs. It’s no surprise that Sinclair Mahdavi is an artist, seeing the way he approaches the world around him; it is nostalgic, and the writing almost feels soaked in the sunlight of Mallorca. The author is frank about an unhappy stint at a British public school, sexual abuse from the young man meant to be looking after him and his brother in Mallorca, and being told his girlfriend had died in a car accident when he was a teenager. Sometimes the other characters in the author’s story seem too lightly drawn (even his parents at times), which can make them hard to relate to. But overall, this is a moving portrait of the author’s formative years.

An engaging and wistful tale of a peripatetic postwar childhood.