Forget-Me-Not

There’s a phrase from a Borges poem that I can’t get out of my head. It’s short, just four spare words, less than a line, scavenged from its original place in the poem and repurposed as the title of a now-famous Colombian memoir: El olvido que seremos. I remember the words not for themselves but because my father and I once had an impassioned disagreement about their potential translation, and by extension their meaning. I thought the English version had to be something like “the forgetting we become”: the inevitability that our lives and everything we create inside them—all we deposit into the world, the love we dish out and accept back and plead for hopelessly—will be forgotten by anyone who might’ve once been around to remember us. Memory is a frail casing; one day, finally, we’ll be gone. But my father had a different opinion. He believed the phrase could be translated like this: “We become what we forget.” El olvido que seremos: how the many things that jump the ship of our memory come to haunt and define us, long after (either by choice or by neglect) we’ve forgotten them. 

I wish I could ask Francisco Goldman—or his doppelgänger protagonist, Francisco Goldberg—about the Borges phrase. I’m sure both men, in whatever real or imagined world, would have some scrupulous, incandescent thing to say about its meaning. Both have read Borges and likely know about his many idiosyncrasies, his fear of mirrors, his blindness, his claim that languages aren’t essentially synonymous, his avowal that he was constantly in love. Both, I suspect, would understand all the vast and unconquerable distances at play: between one language and another, between any two distinct readings of the world, between any one father and his son. 

Goldman’s Monkey Boy—his fifth novel, alongside a book of investigative journalism and a chronicle of Mexico City—is a book something like that Borges phrase: closely examined, it might come to mean the very opposite of what you first believed it to mean, until its true meaning, untranslatable, seems composed of the very act of self-diversion, an accumulation of disparate and irreconcilable meanings. First it is a story about an older man visiting home. Then it’s a love story. Then it’s a story about war. Then it’s a story about familial violence. Before, during, and after, in the novel’s many wanderings and creases, it’s...