Praise for Mourning
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
“A feat of literary acrobatics.” —New York Review of Books
More Praise for Eduardo Halfon’s Fiction
“Halfon is a brilliant storyteller.” —Daniel Alarcón
“Halfon’s prose is as delicate, precise, and ineffable as precocious art, a lighthouse that illuminates everything.” —Francisco Goldman
“Elegant.” —Marie Claire
“Engrossing.” —NBC Latino
“Fantastic.” —NPR Alt.Latino
“Deeply accessible, deeply moving.” —Los Angeles Times
“Offer[s] surprise and revelation at every turn.” —Reader’s Digest
“One senses Kafka’s ghost, along with Bolaño’s, lingering in the shadows. . . . [Halfon’s] books, which take on such dark subjects, are so enjoyable to read.” —New York Review of Books
“[Halfon’s hero] delights in today’s risible globalism, but recognizes that what we adopt from elsewhere makes us who we are.” —New York Times Book Review
“Extraordinary. . . . Establish[es] an affinity between fiction and autobiography that unsettles generic divisions.” —World Literature Today
“Halfon is a master of lithe, haunting semi-autobiographical novels.” —Jewish Book Council
“With [Halfon’s] slender but deceptively weighty books, which are at once breezy and melancholic, bemused and bitter, he opens up worlds to readers in return.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Halfon passionately and lyrically illustrates the significance of the journey and the beauty of true mystery.” —Booklist
“[Halfon’s narrator] may be the perpetual wanderer, but his meditations are focused and absorbing.” —Library Journal
“Halfon gives voice to a lesser-known sector of the Jewish diaspora, reminding us in the process of the ways in which identity is both fluid and immutable.” —Publishers Weekly
“Part Jorge Luis Borges, part Sholom Aleichem. . . . Roaming the ashes of the old country, uncovering old horrors, Halfon becomes an archaeologist of atrocity. His work is fiction clothed as memoir. His chronicles are his mourner’s Kaddish.” —Rumpus
“Robert Bolaño once said: ‘The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to (Andrés) Neuman and to a handful of his blood brothers.’ Eduardo Halfon is among that number.” —NewPages
★ 2018-03-20
In his latest autobiographical novel to be translated into English, Guatemalan native Halfon's same-named alter ego continues his far-flung travels to probe hidden family truths dating back to Nazi concentration camps.The author, whose family relocated to the United States when he was 10, is as much instigator as investigator. Against the wishes of his maternal grandfather, a Polish Jew, Halfon visits the Lodz neighborhood where the old man lived before the Gestapo took him away (and where a former porn star now lives in his old place). Returning to Guatemala, he tries to determine whether it was his father's brother Salomón who died at age 5 in a swimming accident there. Other Salomóns, including another 5-year-old who died an identical death, spin through the narrative. For Halfon the storyteller, unsolved mysteries and the freest of free associations satisfy his aims better than established facts. Halfon goes by "Hoffman" after someone mistakenly calls him that name—very possibly, Halfon determines, at the exact moment beloved actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died in New York. "Language is also a diving helmet," Halfon writes in recalling how worlds opened to him when he first learned English. With his slender but deceptively weighty books, which are at once breezy and melancholic, bemused and bitter, he opens up worlds to readers in return.In this follow-up to The Polish Boxer (2012) and Monastery (2014), Halfon constructs a kind of postmodern memorial to his grandfathers, who outlived the horrors of the Holocaust but not its searing emotional aftereffects.
