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. Jewish Week “Spring Arts Preview” selection.
Author
Eduardo Halfon was born in 1971 in Guatemala City. He studied Industrial Engineering at North Carolina State University, and later was professor of Literature at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, in Guatemala. In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on continuing the story of The Polish Boxer, which is the first of his novels to be published in English, by Bellevue Literary Press in the U.S. and Pushkin Press in the U.K. His novels include Esto no es una pipa, Saturno; De cabo roto; El ángel literario; El boxeador polaco; and La pirueta, which won the José María de Pereda Prize for Short Novel in Santander, Spain. His short fiction has been published in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, and Dutch. He has taught literature at Guatemala; in 2007 the Bogotá Hay Festival listed him as one of “39 best young Latin American writers.”
