What Goes Unsaid: A Memoir of Fathers Who Never Were

Mexican novelist Monge (The Arid Sky) eschews the traditional parameters of memoir in this exquisite meditation on the men in his family. “The story,” writes Monge, “concealed as it is by the incidents and events that enfold it,” is found in a sensation he calls “a presentiment”—a hereditary compulsion felt by the men to leave their homes. In the case of Carlos Monge McKey, Monge’s grandfather, leaving took the form of faking his own death. Monge’s father, Carlos Monge Sanchéz, disappeared for long stretches in the 1960s to work with revolutionaries in Mexico. Monge’s departures are less literal exits than they are a metaphorical slipping away from the “lies, macho violence, and unspoken birth rights” of his culture and into different identities—be that through a fantasy life, going to a new country, or starting a new relationship. Weaving their three lives together through vivid fictionalized entries from his grandfather’s diary, an imagined interview with his father that’s by turns profane and loving, and a reflection on his own youth in 1980s Mexico, Monge captures the frailty of memory, while grappling with larger themes of masculinity, mortality, and paternity. The result is a transfixing look at inheritances lost and found. (July)