I was on the second paragraph of
Mourning when I asked myself why I had waited until now to start it. It's a dumb question; I would have asked myself the same thing whenever I decided to start it I think. I got it a little over a year ago and it's not like it would have had significantly more meaning to me then than it did now (in fact, perhaps more today as, at one point, Halfon mentions reading Joseph Roth, a writer I hadn't read until February of this year). As with Halfon's
other books,
Mourning seems to lie somewhere between fiction and memoir; perhaps a collection of short stories, but not clearly so. The first story/chapter of
Mourning recounts a trip to Calabria, where the narrator Halfon has been invited to deliver a talk. Only after accepting does he learn the talk is to take place at
a former concentration camp (which, he discovers on arriving, is in fact a reconstruction of a former concentration camp that was destroyed in the 1960s to clear the way for a highway). The town Halfon arrives at in Calabria is the same one where
George Gissing landed in 1897, which I drove through in 2018. I had no idea there had been a concentration camp in the vicinity. I didn't know Italy had had camps at all, though I can't say I was entirely surprised – particularly that one was located in Calabria, a malarial backwater in Mussolini's Italy. As we know, he was fond of
exiling political dissidents in Italy's deep south. But I was surprised I'd never heard of it. Looking at the map, I must have driven right past it (right over it perhaps on the autostrada that it was cleared for) on my way to find Carlo Levi's Aliano.
The bulk of Mourning consists of a long chapter called "Mourning," which takes us in and out of the past, to Poland, Germany, Lebanon, Corsica, La Havre, New York, Miami, and Guatemala tracing Halfon's family's movements, his own movements, the secret story of his uncle who died as a child. It's heartbreaking and beautiful at every turn.
