Book - BookDetective

Name: Mourning

Author: Eduardo Halfon
Year: 2017
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Genres/categories:
Fiction

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ISBNs:
9781942658443
1942658443

In Mourning, Eduardo Halfon's eponymous narrator travels to Poland, Italy, the U.S., and the Guatemalan countryside in search of secrets he can barely name. He follows memory's strands back to his maternal roots in Jewish Poland and to the contradictory, forbidden stories of his father's Lebanese-Jewish immigrant family, specifically surrounding the long-ago childhood death by drowning of his uncle Salomon. But what, or who, really killed Salomon? As he goes deeper, he realizes that the truth lies buried in his own past, in the brutal Guatemala of the 1970s and his subsequent exile to the American South.

Mourning is a subtle and stirring reflection on the formative and destructive power of family mythology, silence, and loss.

In consultation with the author, Mourning was translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, both of whom also contributed to the translations of The Polish Boxer and Monastery.

Jewish Week "Spring Arts Preview" selection.