WHAT GOES UNSAID

An imaginatively told family history of three generations of Mexican men grappling with toxic masculinity.

In 1958, Monge’s grandfather Carlos Monge McKey faked his own death in a quarry in Sinaloa and disappeared from his family’s life for four years. Although the author, a renowned Mexican novelist and columnist for El País, was initially hesitant to tell a story he knew would “[cause] great distress” to his relatives, his grandfather’s actual death compelled him to unearth the details of his grandfather’s deceit and its effect on future generations. Rather than narrating the story in third person, Monge channels his father’s (Carlos Monge Sánchez) and grandfather’s voices to speculate about the motivations behind their dubious choices. In the chapters about Sánchez, the author writes in first person, recording an imagined conversation between father and son about Sánchez’s stint as a resistance fighter in the 1960s. In the sections about his grandfather, Monge renders the narrative in diary entries recorded in the years and months before McKey planned his fake death. The only sections in third person are the often cinematic—and rarely flattering—descriptions of Monge’s own life, some of which feature stories about other ancestors. In the final chapter, Sánchez’s voice articulates his son’s fear of repeating his ancestor’s patterns: “Say what you like, but you’re here to find out whether, by writing about him, you can escape. But I’m telling you right now that there’s no escape....You’re always going around talking and accusing people, but if there’s someone who doesn’t know what he wants, someone who’s made up stories, someone who’s spent his life running away from himself, it’s you….Excuses. The most delicate and carefully honed of your skills.” Through this intensely vulnerable and beautifully written memoir, the author layers the text with emotional honesty and self-reflection. Although the chorus of voices occasionally feels overly self-flagellating, they create a page-turning, deeply human portrait.

A formally innovative, devastatingly trenchant history of masculine family trauma.