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.
