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    Tomb Song: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Tomb Song: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Tomb Song: A Novel
    Ebook215 pages3 hours

    Tomb Song: A Novel

    By Julián Herbert

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    An incandescent new voice from Mexico, for readers of Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk

    Sitting at the bedside of his mother as she is dying from leukemia in a hospital in northern Mexico, the narrator of Tomb Song is immersed in memories of his unstable boyhood and youth. His mother, Guadalupe, was a prostitute, and Julián spent his childhood with his half brothers and sisters, each from a different father, moving from city to city and from one tough neighborhood to the next.

    Swinging from the present to the past and back again, Tomb Song is not only an affecting coming-of-age story but also a searching and sometimes frenetic portrait of the artist. As he wanders the hospital, from its buzzing upper floors to the haunted depths of the morgue, Julián tells fevered stories of his life as a writer, from a trip with his pregnant wife to a poetry festival in Berlin to a drug-fueled and possibly completely imagined trip to another festival in Cuba. Throughout, he portrays the margins of Mexican society as well as the attitudes, prejudices, contradictions, and occasionally absurd history of a country ravaged by corruption, violence, and dysfunction.

    Inhabiting the fertile ground between fiction, memoir, and essay, Tomb Song is an electric prose performance, a kaleidoscopic, tender, and often darkly funny exploration of sex, love, and death. Julián Herbert’s English-language debut establishes him as one of the most audacious voices in contemporary letters.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 6, 2018
    ISBN9781555979898
    Unavailable
    Tomb Song: A Novel

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    Reviews for Tomb Song

    3/5

    23 ratings4 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I just couldn't get into this book. It might have been better to read it on a Kindle where I could look up all the different words I didn't know. After reading other's people reviews I decided to not finish this book. I feel like I've read a lot of death bed books lately (Fever Dream) and I didn't need to finish this one.
    • 2/5
      This book was too weird for me. The author is a character in his own novel (I hate that!), and per the back cover this book "inhabit[s] the fertile ground between fiction, memoir, and essay". I disagree, that's not fertile ground. I love novels, I love memoirs, and I occasionally read essays--but I prefer them all distinct. In this novel Herbert is tracing his mother's death from leukemia. The time he spends in hospital with her, and her decline. He also discusses growing up with her and his half siblings--mom was a prostitute, so they moved a lot. Now he is a writer, and he travels to Cuba and Germany. Or does he? Are these fever dreams or drug/alcohol induced "memories"? Are his friends real or fake--he seems confused himself. Is Herbert the character an unreliable narrator? Does that mean Herbert the author is too? Are these other characters really his family and co-workers, or is he the only real person in here? It's all so confusing, and mostly it is too confusing to be interesting. Perhaps it would be more interesting with an IRL book club--or maybe it would just be argumentative.I think I might enjoy a memoir or essays by Herbert. But not a novel.
    • 3/5
      Tomb Song is the story of a man sitting in his mother's hospital room, waiting for her to die. She was a prostitute and his life involved a lot of temporary fathers and moving around. Sounds like a book seeped in misery, doesn't it? Despite the scaffolding, Julián Herbert has written a surprisingly upbeat and honest novel. This isn't a book propelled forward by the plot; it digresses, it heads off onto tangents, it meanders, returning to earlier topics, while abandoning others. The narrator waits. He cares for his mother. He follows often conflicting instructions from the nurses and doctors. He walks the halls, and thinks about his past, from his childhood to the trips he took to Berlin with his wife. Parts of the story are fascinating, some were less enthralling. The writing style of this novel reminded me of another Mexican novel, Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, although that may also be influenced by having the same translator. If you like discursive novels, you'll want to take a look at Tomb Song.
    • 4/5
      This took me some time to appreciate, but then I raced towards the end. A little meta-writerly angst, during the hospice of mom. Not cheery but well done and painfully good.