Volume 44, Number 19 · December 4, 1997
Passage to Brooklyn
By Edwin Frank
The Ordinary Seaman
by Francisco Goldman
Atlantic Monthly Press, 387 pp., $23.00
Francisco Goldman is a young, part-Guatemalan writer and journalist who has lived and worked for long periods in both the US and Central America. In 1993 he published a remarkable first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, in which he sought to pull together the often conflicting perspectives of his double background. The novel revolved around the story of Flor de Mayo Puac, a young Indian woman sent as a child to be the house-servant of a half-Guatemalan, half-American family living in a Boston suburb. She grows up there, virtually adopted into the family, before returning to her home country to head an orphanage for the children of the disappeared. Then, in the midst of the terror of the early Eighties, she is found murdered, and the son of the American family, who is deeply attached to Flor, flies south to investigate her death. Out of this situation Goldman constructed a story which was very much that of a particular family, but which he developed in such a way as to encompass the tortured history of the Guatemalan civil war, a story that went beyond the summary account of the newspapers to convey the bitter, byzantine realities of daily life in a terrorized society.
Review, 2374 words
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