Missing (Una investigación). [Missing (An Investigation)]

Chilean author and filmmaker Fuguet first wrote about his obsession with the disappearance of his Uncle Carlos in a short story published in 2003. Following a fight with his parents in 1986, Carlos Fuguet fled his California home, and nobody in the family knew of his whereabouts since then. It turns out that only months after he wrote the short story, Fuguet tracked down his uncle in a Denver motel. He immediately began working on this book: a biography that is also the story of the book itself, as well as an autobiography. Fuguet readers will find themselves in familiar territory, since he also revisited his childhood, spent between Chile and California, in his semiautobiographical novel Las películas de mi vida. Interestingly, this work allows for even more literary experimentation than the novel: some chapters are told in the first person, there are emails and interview transcriptions, and Carlos's biography is written in free verse. This last part, which takes up half of the book, is probably the only slip in an otherwise absorbing narrative: Carlos's character is appealing and well layered, but reading his story line by line could get tiresome and feel a bit gratuitous. Despite these formalist excesses, Fuguet's chaotic yet grandiose meditation on family, self-searching, immigration, and the meaning of the American Dream is both thought-provoking and highly enjoyable. Recommended for general collections, as well as bookstores.—Carlos Rodríguez Martorell, East Elmhurst, NY