Mourning
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 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, Monastery, and Canción.
International Latino Book Award Winner
Edward Lewis Wallant Award Winner
Kirkus Prize Finalist
Neustadt International Prize Finalist
Balcones Fiction Prize Finalist
PEN Translation Prize Longlist
Kirkus Reviews “Best Book of the Year” selection
Library Journal “Top Work in Translation” selection
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781942658443
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781942658450
Eduardo Halfon discusses Mourning with co-translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, in a conversation moderated by Edward Lewis Wallant Award judge Avinoam Patt, in the Mass Review.
Blurring the line between fact and fiction, Eduardo Halfon shares family photographs and an annotated excerpt from Mourning in “A Yom Kippur Scene (With Footnotes)” on the Jewish Book Council’s “ProsenPeople” blog.
Read more from Mourning in an excerpt introduced by director Jonas Mekas at Electric Literature, in a deleted scene at Stay Thirty Magazine, where Eduardo Halfon also participates in the One Hundred Words project, and in BOMB magazine.
Eduardo Halfon is the author of The Polish Boxer, Monastery, Mourning, and Canción. He is the recipient of the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature, Roger Caillois Prize, José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel, International Latino Book Award, Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and Berman Literature Prize, among other honors. A citizen of Guatemala and Spain, Halfon was born in Guatemala City, attended school in Florida and North Carolina, and has lived in Nebraska, Spain, Paris, and Berlin.
visit author page »Praise for Mourning
Powerful, gorgeous. . . . Halfon gives an unforgettable, haunting voice to lesser-known populations of the Jewish diaspora, including Latin American and Lebanese Jews. Mourning shows how the weaving together of diasporic families across cultures and places creates ripples through generations.
Halfon’s magnificent prose and abundant storytelling prowess work in tandem to create an irresistible style. . . . As with the ghostly, evocative trails of smoke that have adorned each of Halfon’s English edition covers, Mourning is possessed by traces of the ethereal, the mysterious, and the shadowy. . . . [It] functions wonderfully as the third volume in Halfon’s bittersweet, doleful inquest into family folklore, remembrance, and indelible generational anguish.