The Long Night of White Chickens
Given the parts of his biography that are readily available online, one gets the distinct impression that in his 1992 début novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, the Guatemalan-American writer Francisco Goldman is writing semi-autobiographically. Indeed, like Roger Graetz—the novel’s protagonist and sometime narrator—Goldman grew up in Boston as the son of a Guatemalan mother. And the vivid accounts of visits to Guatemala, down to the descriptions of the family’s department store in the capital city, feel recognizable to me, like they come from lived experience.
Beyond those details, though, a lot of the rest of what happens in this novel is the work of a peculiar imagination. Although the story places Roger at the center of the action, we find ourselves most interested in Flor, the Guatemalan orphan who first comes to Roger’s home as the family maid but assumes the role of an older sister. Later, after returning to Guatemala to run an orphanage, Flor is murdered. Roger follows her to Guatemala in an effort to retrace her steps and get answers. Reconnecting with a childhood friend who has become a journalist (and had been in an ill-fated romantic relationship with Flor), together they embark on a search for clues. It’s a murder mystery novel of the slowest, murkiest, most mercurial sort. Not a lot of action to speak of. Even fewer chickens, white or otherwise. Nor is it always clear why conversations continue quite as long as they do; this book’s editor must have been fairly non-interventionist.
As an award-winning novel that shows up on virtually every list of “essential” literature from the country, The Long Night of White Chickens is something that any reader with a vested interest in Guatemalan writing probably needs to have read. It’s not required reading for anyone else.
