Gabino Iglesias May 4, 2021
“Monkey Boy” by Francisco Goldman Photo: Grove Press
Francisco Goldman’s “Monkey Boy,” which can easily be considered biographical, is the kind of novel that shows you real horror while simultaneously making you laugh. It’s also a novel about inhabiting the interstitial spaces between languages, cities, countries and cultures.
In the novel, Francisco Goldberg is an American writer living in Mexico and thinking about his next novel when he’s forced to return to New York City after a threat comes because of his journalism work.
While in Brooklyn, he meets a woman and seems to be on the verge of starting a new life, but he is called back home to Boston for a few days by a high school friend so he can spend time with his Guatemalan mother he calls her Mamita who is in a care facility and whose lucidity comes and goes. When it’s not there, she talks to ghosts, but when it’s present, she reveals bits and pieces of the famil