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Loading... Tomb Song (2011)by Julián Herbert
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 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. 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. 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. no reviews | add a review
As he sits by his dying mother, a son immerses himself in his memories of his childhood and youth while he investigates the complex relationship with his mother, his own children and his country, Mexico. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)863Literature Spanish and Portuguese Spanish fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Bastante sobrevalorado. ( )