During a five-day visit to his hometown of Boston, a writer attempts to fit together the pieces of his own past, his mother's, and that of her native Guatemala."
Nice quick summary of this Pulitzer Prize finalist by Francisco Goldberg, whose narrator in this very autobiographical is Frank Goldberg .
Frank is returning to Boston to see his mother and possibly his sister, but the five day trip will connect him to all his memories of a childhood filled with parental beatings and school bullies. It also recalls the loves of his life and the possibility of a new relationship. Time is pretty fluid in the narrative as Frank using a simple skipped line to change from current time to his journalistic career in South America, where his expose of the governmental murder of a bishop ( true story) has prompted his to escape from retaliation. Incidents from history, like the CIA's overthrow of the Guatemalan government to the benefit of the American banana company, make for some fascinating reading, as do Goldberg's natural storytelling abilities. "He was plunging into what was fast becoming one of the era’s darkest proxy wars, a horrific conflict that was first sparked in the 1950s by the United States’ covert removal of Guatemala’s left-wing president, Jacobo Árbenz, and that over the ensuing decades claimed the lives of 200,000 people, displaced a million more, and unleashed the guns and gangs that rule the country now.(New York review)"
I'm glad I picked up this novel-It's not quite Juno Diaz, but comparable. I would recommend this and will look to explore some of his other works.

Lines
It was all so different with Gisela, who possessed what Mexicans call morbo, a moody sultriness like human opium.

I’m mesmerized by the extraordinary hues and texture of Lulú’s hair, a dark rich buffalo-pelt brown with faint coppery shadings, a whirly wild complexity like a Jackson Pollock painting but one in only those colors.

Proust wrote in his novel that a man, during the second half of his life, might become the reverse of who he was in the first.

my father shoving me down onto the floor with hand clamped around the back of my neck, my mother chirping: Bert! Bert! Not in the head! Don’t hit him in the head! It happened so often, all the different times blend into one long memory like the loud blur of a fast train passing on the opposite track.

I met Gisela at a party within days of having moved to Mexico City. A love-at-first-sight thing, like I’d been torn open, gutted, and refilled with pure yearning I could hardly bear.Her Picasso harlequin girl expressiveness, the straight line between her lips that when bent downwards at the corners and pulling her face down with it could make her look so tragic and so childishly gleeful when stretched out, deepening her dimples. Her jittery overcaffeinated Audrey Hepburn lissomness and poise. Her rich-girl-gone-wrong haughty moodiness.

Father Doyle was baroquely bulky, with a ruler-straight part in his thin brown hair, narrow eyes that looked scribbled in with a pencil, a long sloping nose, lips like jelly candy.

That was one historically literate cop, though, to make that connection between my mother’s country and the originally Boston-based fruit company that gave birth to Chiquita and helped bring years of military dictatorship and slaughter to her country.

As I watched her leaning over my cast, listening to the squeak of her marker against the plaster, a warmth went through me like a wave, one that carried me all the way to that locked room where emotions are stored like bicycles that have never been ridden.

the maw of his navel hanging out over his belt like a screaming Edvard Munch face.

She’s a hydra of explosive nerves; the key to being with her is learning how to avoid lighting those fuses.

Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo and their search for the children of their own disappeared sons and daughters. Most of those young mothers were already pregnant when they were abducted; some were impregnated in the Argentine military’s clandestine prisons, mostly by jailors and torturers who raped them. Born in the secret birthing wards of military hospitals, weaned after a few days from mothers who would soon be put aboard death flights, those stolen infants were almost never, as they grew up, told the truth about their origins by their adoptive parents. So far, nearly a hundred of those offspring have been found and united with their grandmothers. ( )

A densely packed and wonderful family story of a complex group of people over three generations. The main character (Francisco) comes from a Jewish father and a Guatemalan mother who becomes a writer and he struggles to make sense of his complex background. As a youth he is called Monkey Boy by bullies and eventually overcomes this stigma. He has a complicated abusive father and his kind mother also tries to get past dad's abuse. Grandma and other relatives are major players in the book book set in the United Atates and Guatemala. The novel deserves all of it's plaudets. ( )

Compelling enough, but didn't quite have the bite or the romance of Oscar Wao, for all the similarities. Others may have better luck, though. It may be the story of a troubled relationship with Judaism and ageing parents was a bit close to home for some wintry escapism. ( )

Picked this up because of his interview with NPR, which was interesting. His story seemed to be engaging as he overcame a dysfunctional childhood and an abusive parent. I am also interested in stories of "hybrid" households, of people from very different cultures. But I found the book rambling and self-indulgent and a difficult book with which to stay engaged. ( )

While I applaud the humility with which the author’s alter ego describes his life, growing up with an angry Russian immigrant for a father and a Guatemalan mother, I could not connect with the story. I tried reading it and then listening to the audio book. The audiobook was well done, but the only thing I left with was an appreciation of his concern about other Central American refugees. ( )