Tomb Song

Tomb Song is hard to review. It is the story of the adult son of a prostitute sitting by his mother's bed as she's dying of leukemia in a hospital. Family history and memories of his relationship with his mother are certainly a part of this tale, but so are stories of his real and/ or hallucinated trips abroad and his exploits with drugs and politics. This can also be read as the story of the narrator becoming a writer. The narrative is hard to pin down. In some ways, this is a good book to read on the bus or on lunch breaks, because sections are short, sometimes less than a page. But reading it in short bits like that can also add to the sense that nothing quite fits together, that it's not a coherent story.

The author, Julian Herbert, is a poet, and it shows in the story. The language is vibrant, pictorial. There are refrains that appear here and there, like “My mother isn't my mother; my mother was (music, a virus).” There are arresting Images like a traffic cop standing in one's bloodstream saying, “keep moving, keep moving,” or characterizing love as a virus that “ injects itself into something; it reproduces without thought; it egotistically takes possession of its host, without consideration for the species, taxonomy, or health; it is symbiotic.”

So, the experience of reading this book was beautiful, strange, and disorienting. I finished it feeling like a lot of it went over my head. If you don't mind feeling that way, you'll get a lot out of this book too.