Father's Day: The sorrows and joys of life as a son, in Iván Noble's new novel

“These surgeons, who enter someone else’s mind like someone entering a shoe store, what will they talk about in the meantime? Will they recount their weekends? Will they share Tinder stories? Will they recommend Netflix series? Will they make bad jokes about the patient? Will they make fun of my old man’s sleeping features? Will they make bets on what they’re about to find?” This is the question asked by the narrator of Dr. Álvarez vs. the All Blacks (Planeta, 2025), the new novel by Iván Noble , also author of Como el cangrejo. Bitácora emocional de gira (Like the Crab. Emotional Log on Tour) (Galerna, 2017) and the poetry collection De tal palo (Due to Such a Suit), shared with ¡Basta de escribir novelas! (Basta de escribir novelas!) by Washington Cucurto (Garrincha Club, 2013). He is a man who, about to turn fifty, receives tragic and brutal news: his father has a malignant, highly aggressive brain tumor, and has only a few months to live.

Noble was the frontman of the rock band Los caballeros de la quema from 1989 to 2001, before dedicating himself to a solo career. "Avanti morocha," included on the 1998 album La paciencia de la araña , which sold 30,000 copies , is perhaps his most memorable hit. Another of his greatest hits, this time from his solo career, was "Bienbenito," a song from the 2007 album Intemperie , dedicated to his son. "Your smile became the sweet bread of my mornings / I still don't know how to name this love that disarms me / When I see you like this, chubby and filibuster / the only thing that matters to me, now yes, is growing old," say its first verses.

In this long-form writing experience, Noble seems as comfortable as he is writing songs. In El doctor Álvarez contra los All Blacks, he narrates in an autobiographical tone the illness and death of his father —the final days of the family of four, the reflections of an adult son facing his imminent new status as an orphan and, at the same time, the main male role model in the group—but it is also a luminous journey through the life of this father, who was a dermatologist in municipal hospitals and neighborhood clinics, and of the close bond he maintained with his son—as well as with his daughter, although in this case she appears in the background—and the unconditional love he had with his wife, with whom he always lived in the same house in the western part of the Province of Buenos Aires.

From that house, young Iván left with his family to spend Christmas Eve for the only time at the Ituzaingó Hospital, where his father was on guard duty . It was there, as an adult, that he spent his last Christmas Eve with his family and his father.

“My old lady silently tore apart a chicken roll like a busy mother preparing school lunches. It was practically in vain; we all knew my old man had been diminishing his appetite almost to the point of starvation. He barely touched his food, even his most prized ones. I asked him if he wanted to listen to some music, and he barely raised his eyes to reply with an inaudible “Okay.” I put on a Louis Armstrong CD hoping it would change his mood, but I spied his reaction, and there was none .”

Music is present throughout the story , as in the tangos by Edmundo Rivero that the narrator plays in the room of the clinic where his father is hospitalized, or when he describes in detail the moment in which his father struggles to make himself understood, but finally, with great perseverance, succeeds.

The word he wanted to say was "Gardel." "What was the last song he enjoyed?" the son wonders , reflecting: "When my father liked them, he smiled silently."

In two different time periods, the story oscillates between the illness, hospitalization and the last moments spent with his father as a family and the memories of his childhood with him, such as when, around the age of five, Dr. Álvarez had bought tickets to go together to see a great fight of Titans in the Ring: the White Mummy against the Black Mummy.

He didn't sleep the night before, first because he was so excited, but later because he felt really bad, until the morning when the diagnosis was confirmed: fever . His father told him he would take him to the next fight, and he insisted it had to be that time, begging to be taken anyway.

After overcoming the adults' resistance—the mother gave up trying to keep her son safe due to exhaustion—a glass of Tang juice and an aspirin arrived in the hands of his father, which declared the battle won for little Ivan, who managed to go with him, happy despite the sleepless night and bundled up to the teeth, to see his television idols.

“ He was a Robinson Crusoe in slippers. If they'd given him an immigrant trunk to carry his most precious things, he'd have had half the space left. And the first thing he'd have put in there would have been my old lady,” the narrator reflects at one point, outlining the profile of the father he develops throughout the pages of Dr. Álvarez vs. the All Blacks , a book written from the love and sadness of the frontman of a band who, even when the situation was already extremely serious, performed with his band before a massive audience at a very important concert that he decided to toast anyway.

“I had participated in the last rehearsals trying to convince myself that I was doing what my old man would have wanted me to do : I would go straight from the hospital, arrive in the room, put on my guitar, and put my head on autopilot to sing. I would leave my cell phone resting on the guitar case, next to the microphone, and every time the screen lit up, I would bend down to look, thinking that, this time, the message letting me know it was all over would arrive.”

Every camera focused on him, every light shone on him, every cell phone pointed at him. But even on stage, he was a broken son inside , waiting at any moment to be told that his father was no longer in this world.

Dr. Álvarez against the All Blacks , by Iván Noble (Planeta).