I just couldn't get through the dialogue. I wanted to like the book since it spoke to themes close to my heart, but the narrative style wasn't readily available to me.

The author had an interesting story of a father who fakes his death to escape his life, as well as writing well with clever style. But I was overwhelmed by the heavy emotion that didn’t really let up and did not finish. ( )

I find memoirs very difficult to review, and this one is no exception. It's hard to comment on the actual story being told, as the real experiences of the author and his family. I'll focus instead on the story-telling itself: I found the jumps around in both time and the changes in style abrupt and at times hard to follow. Every time I started to get my bearings on who was narrating, what was happening in relation to other sections, and got in the flow of the style again, that part of the book would end and I'd be tempted to put it down rather than continuing. In the end I'm glad I finished reading, but am unsure whether I can actually recommend the experience. ( )

What Goes Unsaid is a well-written, evocative, fluid account of fathers and sons, tales and realities, here and not here, actual and fictional, truth and lies, remembered and forgotten, visible and invisible, present and not present, witnessed and imagined, cruel and loving, spoken and silent, freedom and bondage, life and death and rebirth. ( )

Emiliano Monge (1978-) is an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and children’s books who is one of the most highly regarded Mexican and Latin American writers of our time. His latest book to be published in English translation focuses on the lives of his paternal grandfather, Carlos Monge McKey, his father, Carlos Monge Sánchez, all of whom share one major trait: each found a way to escape from his family to pursue his own needs and desires, and in doing so neglected their responsibilities as husbands, fathers, and sons.

The book opens with a quote from the front-page headline of a newspaper published in Culiacán, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa, in 1962: “MONGE, DEPRAVED RASPUTIN!” The Monge in question is the author’s paternal grandfather, who disappeared four years earlier after staging his own death, leaving behind and severely disrupting the lives of his wife and four children, until he suddenly reappears four years without a hint of penitence, as if he had left to go to a corner store a few minutes earlier. Monge describes his grandfather’s scheme, then places it in context for what is to come:

But the scene that I have just sketched is not what matters. It is simply a list of events, And events are not the story. Even facts are not the whole story. The story is an invisible current in the depths that moves all things. The true story is why my grandfather sensed—instinctively, as an animal might—that he had to leave. Just as, many years later, my father would do the same. And how, in turn, my moment came.

The author returns to his home town to interview his father, a bitter man who is wracked with illness and frailty and seems much older than his apparent age would suggest. The fictionalized conversation between the two men consists only of the father’s dialogue, and the reader is left to fill in the son’s comments. The history of the Monge family is slowly revealed, akin to separating the layers of an onion, as the son extracts details about the life of his relatives, from his reluctant father. Other chapters consist of diaries kept by the maternal grandfather, and the author’s own story of his life, and those of his parents and brothers, told in the context of México over the past 75 years.

What Goes Unsaid was an interesting view into the lives of a remarkable but not unusual Mexican family, and the often difficult and fractured relationships that men of all backgrounds have with their families, and with each other. ( )