Staff Pick
Tomb Song is a grief-stricken fib, a taffy enfolded with adoration and resentment both — for a mother, for a country, for literature — then stretched to its very limits. Herbert's requiem darts between brothels and hospitals, from opium-binges in Cuba to a poetry conference in Berlin, yet never loses its sense of dogged inquiry and damaged musicality. Translated here by the great Christina MacSweeney, Tomb Song is a gift in any language. Recommended By Justin W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
An incandescent US debut 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.
Review
“An extraordinary author in full possession of his powers who from now on should be considered indispensable.” Patricio Pron, Letras Libres
Review
“With writing that is simultaneously rough and beautiful, [Tomb Song is] an epic without heroes that shatters the glass ceiling of hypocrisy.” Iván de la Nuez, Babelia
About the Author
Julián Herbert was born in Acapulco in 1971. He is a writer, musician, and teacher, and is the author of several poetry collections, a novel, a story collection, and a book of reportage. He lives in Saltillo, Mexico.