Mourning

In Mourning, Eduardo Halfon’s eponymous narrator travels to Poland, Italy, the U.S., & the Guatemalan countryside in search of secrets he can barely name. "In this follow-up to The Polish Boxer & Monastery, Halfon constructs a kind of postmodern memorial to his grandfathers, who outlived the horrors of the Holocaust but not its searing emotional aftereffects." — Kirkus ReviewsHe follows memory’s strands back to his maternal roots in Jewish Poland & 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 Salomón. But what, or who, really killed Salomón? As he goes deeper, he realizes that the truth lies buried in his own past, in the brutal Guatemala of the 1970s & his subsequent exile to the American South. "The question of what is real & what isn’t, & if such distinctions even can be made, is at the heart of Mourning ... the questions raised in the novel - such as the veracity of a tragic family tale that our narrator vividly remembers hearing as a boy & that no one in his family can later recall - make us ponder the fact that so much of who we are & what we believe is the product of story, coincidence, & even misunderstanding." — Jessie Szalay, Jewish Book CouncilMourning is a subtle & stirring reflection on the formative & destructive power of family mythology, silence, & loss. In consultation with the author, Mourning was translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman & Daniel Hahn, both of whom also contributed to the translations of his novels The Polish Boxer, Monastery, & Canción. Eduardo Halfon is the recipient of the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature. Daniel Hahn, the award-winning writer, editor, translator, & translation advocate, received the 2023 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature... The nomadic odyssey of Eduardo Halfon continues as he searches for his roots through tangled childhood memories of a haunting family tragedy International Latino Book Award Winner * Edward Lewis Wallant Award Winner In Mourning , Eduardo Halfon's eponymous wanderer 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 Salom#243;n. But what, or who, really killed Salom#243;n? 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 The nomadic odyssey of Eduardo Halfon continues as he searches for his roots through tangled childhood memories of a haunting family tragedy International Latino Book Award Winner * Edward Lewis Wallant Award Winner In Mourning , Eduardo Halfon's eponymous wanderer 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 Salomón. But what, or who, really killed Salomón? 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 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 Salomón. But what, or who, really killed Salomón? 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 A mysterious family tragedy inspires a journey across the globe, into the past, and through the tangled memories of childhood