Mourning
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- 15٫99 US$
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- 15٫99 US$
وصف الناشر
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Halfon (The Polish Boxer) spins a bewitching tale of a man named Eduardo Halfon who travels half the globe on a quest to understand his dark family history. His journey begins in Calabria, where he visits a place not widely associated with Italy: a concentration camp. Halfon the narrator, a Spanish-speaking Jew, is ostensibly in Italy to speak about a book he wrote about how his Polish grandfather survived the Holocaust, but his exploits reveal his need to more viscerally understand this tragic experience. In this vein, he goes to d , Poland, where his grandfather was captured by the Gestapo in 1939 at the age of 19. While his grandfather had discouraged him from ever visiting, he told Halfon the address of his former home during their final conversation. He finds the apartment, which he has long felt driven to see, though he struggles to articulate why. After leaving Poland, he visits his Lebanese grandparents' lake home in Guatemala to investigate a tragedy from that side of his family: his Uncle Salom n's childhood drowning. What he finds is unexpected and gives new dimension to the roles that secrets and memory play in his family. Careful, arresting prose brings everything together in a moving, evocative story of the narrator's bloodline.
