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A Memoir of Fathers Who Never Were
by Emiliano Monge
From one of Mexico's leading writers - a memoir about three men who are driven to escape the confines of their traditional lives and roles.
In 1958, Carlos Monge McKey sneaks out of his home in the middle of the night to fake his own death. He does not return for four years.
A decade later, his son, Carlos Monge Sánchez, deserts his family too, joining a guerrilla army of Mexican revolutionaries.
Their stories are unspooled by grandson and son Emiliano, a writer, who also chooses to escape reality, by creating fictions to run away from the truth.
What Goes Unsaid is an extraordinary memoir that delves into the fractured relationships between fathers and sons, grandfathers and grandsons; that disinters the ugly notions of masculinity and machismo that all men carry with them ― especially in a patriarchal culture like Mexico. It is the story of three men, who ― each in his own way ― flee their homes and families in an attempt to free themselves.
"An imaginatively told family history of three generations of Mexican men grappling with toxic masculinity...A formally innovative, devastatingly trenchant history of masculine family trauma." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"An impressive work that addresses complicated topics such as personal and family life, machismo through generations, and how it is addressed." - Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season
This information about What Goes Unsaid was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Emiliano Monge is a critically acclaimed, award-winning Mexican author. He was selected as one of the most significant Latin American writers by the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2009, and in 2015 was chosen by Conaculta, the Hay Festival, and the British Council as one of twenty essential Mexican writers. In 2018, he was included on a list of the most important Latin American writers under thirty-nine by the Hay Festival. He is a regular columnist for the newspaper El País and has written for many other magazines and publications. He is also a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores Artísticos (National Scheme of Artistic Creators) in Mexico.
Frank Wynne is an Irish literary translator, writer, and editor. He has translated numerous French and Hispanic authors including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Javier Cercas, and Virginie Despentes. Over a career spanning more than twenty years, his work has earned him the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and he was twice awarded both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán. Most recently, his translation of Animalia by Jean-Baptiste del Amo won the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize. He has edited two major anthologies, Found in Translation: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Translated (2018) and QUEER: LGBT Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday (2021).
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