Monkey Boy Hardcover – May 3, 2021

Every divided soul will recognize itself in this wonderful auto-fictional new novel or memoir or movie script by Francisco Goldman, a Jewish-American, Catholic-Nicaraguan, who has been rewriting his life for years. The book opens with a paragraph straight out of Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March and conducts a humorous but tender and painful Proustian investigation of the nature of memory and its instability. Anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s will recognize the freely flowing references to the many cultural signposts in the visual arts, music, and literature, not to mention the results of the author’s own investigations into the love-hate relationship between the US and Central America, in some ways a parallel to his very different father and mother. Many of the narrator’s recollections are triggered by a beautifully painted train ride along the northeast corridor from New York to Boston. Goldman is a prose stylist of the first order; the book contains almost no quotation marks but the conversations flow without confusion. There are strange but apt metaphors everywhere; in addition to Bellow and Proust, Roberto Bolano appears to be another one of Goldman’s literary influencers. The novel’s search for love and familial reconciliation rockets along until it hits the brick wall of the very last page when I believe a serious emotional mistake is made and the author’s alter-ego goes from having no loving relationship to his possible simultaneous involvement with two key players from his past. This is far too rich a banquet to end on. Save for this one page, the novel is witty and fast moving throughout, one of the best and most thoughtful examples of auto-fiction in many years.

This novel is a disorganized mess justifying its existence as the disorganized life of an unreliable narrator author. Its like listening to your drunken Guatemalan-Jewish friend tell a tale until 4am, promising that the storylines will all tie together at the big reveal. They do not. The author is insightful enough and the unreliability clever enough that the book transcends one star. In the end though your many hours patiently awaiting a compelling end will feel just as illusory as the hopes of the narrator. If that's the point, the book is kind of brilliant. But you might need a break thereafter from auto- fiction; you might need to go do something useful, like cut the lawn, volunteer at a shelter, or read Borges.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a minor character in Monkey Boy (Penny Moore). I also took the cover photograph. That said, Monkey Boy, for me, was a beautiful and poignant trip into the past, not just for that of the author, but for anyone who has spent time in Guatemala or a place like it, one that is fraught with violence and injustice, yet one that in the midst of awful drama offers up poignant moments that defy facile judgment: people, like the author, whose allegiances to one place or another are not easily drawn; people who, despite their political allegiances are surprisingly likable or detested; and a main character -- ahem, Mr. Goldberg -- who, as a protagonist who is Boston-Guatemala-Jew-Catholic-white-Latino, never veers from acknowledging that self-identity is hard, especially in the contorted amalgam of stereotypes. Apart from reading this book as someone who is part of it and, as such, pre-disposed to "liking" it, it drove home for me the tenderness and insight that Frank Goldman infuses into every single thing he writes without self-righteousness or self-adulation. Thank you, Frank, for your gift of a new novel.

Like Mr. Goldman's Mother, I am also a Guatemalan native that has lived in the United States for the past 60 years, therefore I very closely identify with the characters in the book and loved every minute of it. I have read Mr. Goldman's other books and have also enjoy reading them. However, I think that you need to be familiar with the culture of both countries to fully understand the depth of his writing and really absorb the importance of the subjects he presents in his books.

Honest, at times both deeply painful and also funny new book by Francisco Goldman, weaving personal history with the history of the times, Guatemala and the US. It is so important to remember the histories of what US policies did to Guatemala- the military coup, the genocide of the Mayan people, the violations of human rights. And dysfunctional family dynamics, written with honesty and love.

I thought this was to be a novel about a man coming from a disfunctional family but it almost felt like an autobiography. The book jumps from one period to another without much drama to bind it together for me. I found my mind wandering at times because I found certain parts disintertisting. There are parts where the author describes the father’s violence towards him that were very painful to read. But these gripping moments were too few and too far in between for me.

Another indelebile read from Francisco Goldman, a btilliant fokkow up to his earlier Long Night if the White Chickens. he will move you with the intimacy of his tale and impress you with the lyrical beauty of his prose.

I sent to a friend as a gift and she loved it! She then bought a couple of his earlier books!

The New Math of migration and a Möbius strip of a tale, reminding the reader that we are not always what we appear to be and at the same time, we are. More, please.