Say Her Name: Summary and book reviews of Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman, plus links to an excerpt from Say Her Name and a biography of Francisco Goldman.
Say Her Name A Novel
by Francisco Goldman
Hardcover: Apr 2011,
288 pages.
Paperback: Apr 2012,
368 pages.
American novelist Francisco Goldman married a beautiful young writer named Aura Estrada in a romantic Mexican hacienda in the summer of 2005. The month before their second anniversary, during a long-awaited holiday, Aura broke her neck while body surfing. Francisco, blamed for Aura's death by her family and blaming himself, wanted to die, too. But instead he wrote Say Her Name, a novel chronicling his great love and unspeakable loss, tracking the stages of grief when pure love gives way to bottomless pain.
Suddenly a widower, Goldman collects everything he can about his wife, hungry to keep Aura alive with every memory. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City with her fiercely devoted mother to her studies at Columbia University, through their newlywed years in New York City and travels to Mexico and Europe - and always through the prism of her gifted writings - Goldman seeks her essence and grieves her loss. Humor leavens the pain as he lives through the madness of utter grief and creates a living portrait of a love as joyous and playful as it is deep and profound.
Say Her Name is a love story, a bold inquiry into destiny and accountability, and a tribute to Aura, who she was and who she would have been.
In poetic fragments and reconstructions of memory, Goldman pieces together the cause of Aura's disaster, then takes off into breathless passages of storytelling in which the tale of a great love and a completely unexpected accident come together. Reading Say Her Name is like watching a painting grow on a canvas, and Goldman is a writer in the way that Van Gogh was a painter - slashing streaks of color, ominous shadows, bursts of light, madness, delight, agony, devotion, and delicate detail across his pages. (Reviewed by Judy Krueger).
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Goldman calls this book a novel and employs some novelistic techniques (composite characters, for instance), but the foundation is in truth: messy, ugly, and wildly complicated truth.
Library Journal
Starred Review. The feeling, the memorial incarnation that this book creates, is monumental... This book about tragic death is a gift for the living.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Moving and tragic... gorgeous, heartbreaking.
Booklist
Starred Review. Enrapturing... Vivid... Goldman has entwined fact and fiction in his previous novels, but never so daringly or so poignantly... Tender, candid, sorrowful, and funny... Goldman has forged a radiant and transcendent masterpiece.
Colm Toibin
This is a beautiful love story, and an extraordinary story of loss. Say Her Name has a forensic honesty, a way of treating each detail, each moment, each emotion, with detailed and exact care. It also has a way of holding the reader, of moving between Brooklyn and Mexico City, capturing the essence of two worlds, capturing the essence of two people who were lucky enough to fall in love.
Annie Proulx Say Her Name is the terrible account of Goldman's loss of his young wife at a remote Mexican beach, but the strong center is his minute examination of his own possible guilt as he wades through the noded, hallucinatory complications of human relations, follows the twisted rails of communication between himself and the intense personalities of Aura's family. Wrenching, funny, powerful, beautiful.
In addition to memorializing and honoring Aura Estrada in his novel, Francisco Goldman also established a literary prize in 2008 in her name.
Aura Estrada was a published short story writer in several Mexican and Latin American magazines including Letralia, Letras Libres, and Gatopardo, and, among many other projects, she published book reviews for The Boston Review and Bookforum. In the year before her death, she was at work on a novel. Though she was close to earning her PhD through the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Literature at Columbia University, her dream was to be a fiction writer and, while still at Columbia, she enrolled in an MFA program at Hunter College in New York.
The Aura Estrada Prize is awarded biannually with the intention of honoring aspiring female writers like Aura who are under 35, write in Spanish, and live in either Mexico or...
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(965 words).
Colm Toibin
Aura Estrada was a published short story writer in several Mexican and Latin American magazines including Letralia, Letras Libres, and Gatopardo, and, among many other projects, she published book reviews for The Boston Review and Bookforum. In the year before her death, she was at work on a novel. Though she was close to earning her PhD through the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Literature at Columbia University, her dream was to be a fiction writer and, while still at Columbia, she enrolled in an MFA program at Hunter College in New York.
