Canción

July 25, 2022
In the absurdist, scattershot latest from Halfon (The Polish Boxer), Beirut-born Jewish textile merchant Halfon’s 1967 kidnapping in Guatemala shapes his Guatemalan writer grandson’s legacy. The grandson Halfon, the narrator, relives his childhood in an attempt to understand why his grandfather was abducted by a butcher turned rebel fighter named Canción before the grandson was born. He interviews Canción’s old comrades in a bar, trying to make sense of Guatemala’s violent history. At a conference for Lebanese writers in Tokyo, which the narrator was invited to despite being neither Lebanese nor able to speak Arabic, audience members call him out as a fraud. The author plays the scene for laughs, though the theme of disguises recurs throughout. Meanwhile, the narrator all but falls in love with a conferee named Aiko, whose own grandfather also suffered wartime brutality. If this is about anything, it’s the messiness of identity, and how the characters use family, country, and history to create themselves and their stories. Unfortunately, the author doesn’t linger long enough on the various characters or situations to keep the reader engaged. It’s the kind of book that aficionados of the author’s work might appreciate, but on its own it tends to frustrate.

September 1, 2022

In 1967, during the Guatemalan Civil War, rebels disguised as policemen and led by the eponymous Canci�n kidnap and hold for ransom the novelist's grandfather and namesake Eduardo Halfon, who is eventually released unharmed. This abduction forms the nucleus of this new work from Halfon, a Guatemalan National Prize winner, as he switches back and forth in time by telling stories within stories. The remaining shorter components are more episodic. "The Bedouin" focuses on family member Salomon, who reads coffee grounds in the grandfather's mansion. "Kimono on the Skin" introduces Aiko, whose grandfather was so badly burned by the Hiroshima nuclear blast that fabric from his kimono melted into his skin. Bookending them is the Lebanese writers' conference in Japan where the author is lecturing. This loose construction makes readers question whether the book is a disjointed novel or a series of thematically related short stories. VERDICT As they did for earlier Halfon books, translators Dillman and Hahn effectively render his fourth work to appear in English. Although the narrative likewise relies heavily on autobiography and treats similar themes, like Jewish identity, the end result creates less of an impact on readers than do Halfon's 2008 The Polish Boxer or his 2018 Mourning.--Lawrence Olszewski

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 15, 2022
Fiction coats reality--or is it the other way around?--in Halfon's brief but eventful account of life during Guatemala's bloody civil war. The book opens with Halfon, a Guatemalan Jew, attending a Lebanese writers conference in Tokyo "disguised as an Arab." He knows only a few words of Arabic and has negligible ties to Lebanon but accepts a rather curious invitation to the confab because he has never been to Japan. Thus begins an unusual family saga centered on his paternal grandfather, who was born in Beirut when it was still part of Syria and fled the city with his family as a teenager. Eduardo Halfon (same name as his grandson) becomes a wealthy textile manufacturer in Guatemala, where he is kidnapped in 1967 by a leftist guerrilla (and former butcher) known as Canci�n, held for ransom for 35 days, and released. All in all, not the worst outcome in a country where government commando forces were dropping innocents, including a living 3-month-old baby, into a dry well and sledgehammering or shooting children who were told they were being taken out of church to get vaccinated. "I wanted to put my fingers in my ears and be deaf and so not have to hear those voices," writes Halfon, who is referring to the intrusive noise of soldiers bursting into his grandfather's house but could be referring to any number of traumatizing moments. As in previous works of autobiographical fiction, including The Polish Boxer (2012) and Mourning (2018), Halfon, who spent much of his childhood in Florida and attended college in the U.S., draws us into this nightmarish world with his understated conversational style. "Everybody knows that Guatemala is a surreal country," his grandfather wrote in a letter to a local newspaper, but the younger Halfon makes the horrors all too real. Another minimasterpiece by a master of the form.

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