Tomb Song
A Novel
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- 39,99 zł
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- 39,99 zł
Publisher Description
An incandescent new voice from Mexico, for readers of Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk
Sitting at the bedside of his mother as she is dying from leukemia in a hospital in northern Mexico, the narrator of Tomb Song is immersed in memories of his unstable boyhood and youth. His mother, Guadalupe, was a prostitute, and Julián spent his childhood with his half brothers and sisters, each from a different father, moving from city to city and from one tough neighborhood to the next.
Swinging from the present to the past and back again, Tomb Song is not only an affecting coming-of-age story but also a searching and sometimes frenetic portrait of the artist. As he wanders the hospital, from its buzzing upper floors to the haunted depths of the morgue, Julián tells fevered stories of his life as a writer, from a trip with his pregnant wife to a poetry festival in Berlin to a drug-fueled and possibly completely imagined trip to another festival in Cuba. Throughout, he portrays the margins of Mexican society as well as the attitudes, prejudices, contradictions, and occasionally absurd history of a country ravaged by corruption, violence, and dysfunction.
Inhabiting the fertile ground between fiction, memoir, and essay, Tomb Song is an electric prose performance, a kaleidoscopic, tender, and often darkly funny exploration of sex, love, and death. Julián Herbert’s English-language debut establishes him as one of the most audacious voices in contemporary letters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mexican writer Herbert joins the autofiction boom with a largely nonfiction debut about the narrator's mother, Guadalupe. As she lies dying of leukemia, the narrator, Juli n, recalls his peripatetic boyhood in the 1980s as the son of a prostitute, with siblings born of numerous fathers and raised in brothels and red-light districts. Cutting back and forth between the past and the present, he meditates on the poverty that shaped his childhood, his experience with drugs, career as a rock musician, and eventual marriage and concerns as a writer. Literature and history are never far from his mind, and to bring form and context to Guadalupe's biography he touches on everything from Oscar Wilde to the legacy of the Mexican engagement in WWII and Castro's Cuba. Readers learn of Guadalupe's love affair with a guerrilla known only as the Karate Teacher and her father's past as a member of the Mexican Communist Party. This proves to be a powerful meditation on maternity and convincingly draws parallels between the uncertainty of history versus memory.
