Francisco Goldman no Independent

Francisco Goldman, um dos convidados da sessão "Literatura das Zonas de Contacto" do Próximo Futuro, dia 20 de Junho, é autor de Say Her Name  (2011), editado em Portugal com o título O Último Dia de um Amor Eterno (Matéria Prima). Goldman assinou ainda The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (O Circuito Interior: Crónica da Cidade do México) (2014) e de três outros romances, The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, The Divine Husband e uma obra de não-ficção, The Art of Political Murder. Estes livros ganharam ou foram seleccionados para numerosos prémios literários, e foram traduzidos para quinze línguas. Ganhou bolsas da Cullman Center, do Guggenheim, e um Berlin Prize, entre outras distinções e prémios.  O seu trabalho foi publicado pela The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Believer, entre várias outras publicações. Vive na Cidade do México e  em Brooklyn, Nova Iorque.

Sobre o livro Say Her Name (O Último Dia de um Amor Eterno), uma história catártica sobre uma experiência real, da perda da mulher, vencedor do prémio Femina Etranger,considerado o melhor livro 2011, pelo New York Times e pelo Guardian, escreve o Independent: 

Francisco Goldman's fourth novel is based on a real tragedy in which his wife, Aura Estrada, broke her neck while body-surfing along the Mexican coast, and died. She had recently turned 30. They had known each other for four years and would have celebrated their second wedding anniversary if she had lived another month.

Frank is the central character, describing, dissecting, celebrating and mourning Aura's life. He paints a flesh-and-blood portrait of a warm-hearted, playful, aspiring young Mexican writer, intimately trawling through his memories, her diaries (kept since childhood) and the unfinished fiction that she left in her computer hard-drive. She had hoped to create an "X-ray" of her childhood through her storytelling. He appears to want to do this for her, in part, in this novel.

The story is all the more dramatic, and tragic, because it is based on facts. Frank's emotional freight – love, happiness, bewilderment, guilt, grief – sounds like Goldman's. Yet the New York author and journalist holds us back from thinking in such clearly divided terms. He wrote in novel form because of a deep suspicion towards the claims of veracity that memoirs boast. All memory turns into a kind of fiction when recounted thus. Say Her Name certainly blurs the clean lines drawn around fiction, biography and memoir. While it is impossible to regard the story as straightforward fiction, it is an immensely powerful and thoroughly accomplished piece of work.

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