“Brimming with subtle mystery, inquisitiveness, oddity, coincidence, and melancholy. . . . A highly entertaining tragedy, a fascinating page-turner.”
Asymptote Journal
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“A careful, precise story that explores the many facets of loss and healing.”
World Literature Today
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“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.”
Jewish Book Council
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“With his slender but deceptively weighty books, which are at once breezy and melancholic, bemused and bitter, [Halfon] opens up worlds to readers in return.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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“Halfon spins a bewitching tale. . . . Careful, arresting prose brings everything together in a moving, evocative story of the narrator’s bloodline.”
Publishers Weekly
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“[Halfon] clarif[ies] in fluid, accessible language that however slippery, memory is essential to who we are.”
Library Journal
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“Halfon’s writing hits a virtual ecstasy.”
Jonas Mekas, director of As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty at Electric Literature
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“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.”
Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)
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“I can’t say enough great things about Eduardo Halfon’s novels. His newest, Mourning, translated by the incredible Lisa Dillman & Daniel Hahn is no exception.”
Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX)
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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.
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.
Kirkus Prize Finalist
PEN Translation Prize Longlist (winners announced February 26, 2019)
Smithsonian magazine “Favorite Book of the Year” selection
Kirkus Reviews “Best Book of the Year” selection
Library Journal “Top Work in Translation” selection
Words Without Borders “Watchlist” selection
Jewish Week “Spring Arts Preview” selection
