Tales of Lives Extinguished All Too Soon

“What can you say,” Erich Segal asked in the first sentence of “Love Story,” his cathartic heave of a novel, “about a 25-year-old girl who died?”

Francisco Goldman’s new book is about his young wife, Aura Estrada, who died as a result of a freak bodysurfing accident in Mexico in 2007. She was 30. He finds plenty to say about her, especially about her ecstatic deportment while on this planet. His descriptions are so vivid that “Say Her Name” practically arrives with 3-D glasses.

He compares her to a “Mexican Bjork” and to Amélie, the heroine of the lovely French movie, and to “Giulietta Masina clowning in ‘La Strada.’ ” He catches her “gleaming black eyes” and her “wheezily pealing laughter” and her “elfin prettiness” and her gap-tooth grin. He absorbs her “axolotl gaze” after sex.

There’s a bit of Jack Kerouac describing Dean Moriarty in the way he recalls Ms. Estrada striding down Brooklyn’s streets. “That agile, hopscotchlike skipping she used to do on the sidewalk,” Mr. Goldman writes, “a winged-heel blur, heel-kicked-back heel-kicked-back while also moving forward in an exhilarated burst down the sidewalk as if propelling herself back to her childhood in Copilco.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/books/say-her-name-and-the-long-goodbye-book-review.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28