Tomb Song

Mexican writer Herbert joins the autofiction boom with a largely nonfiction debut about the narrator’s mother, Guadalupe. As she lies dying of leukemia, the narrator, Julián, recalls his peripatetic boyhood in the 1980s as the son of a prostitute, with siblings born of numerous fathers and raised in brothels and red-light districts. Cutting back and forth between the past and the present, he meditates on the poverty that shaped his childhood, his experience with drugs, career as a rock musician, and eventual marriage and concerns as a writer. Literature and history are never far from his mind, and to bring form and context to Guadalupe’s biography he touches on everything from Oscar Wilde to the legacy of the Mexican engagement in WWII and Castro’s Cuba. Readers learn of Guadalupe’s love affair with a guerrilla known only as the Karate Teacher and her father’s past as a member of the Mexican Communist Party. This proves to be a powerful meditation on maternity and convincingly draws parallels between the uncertainty of history versus memory. (Mar.)