Canción

by Eduardo Halfon

Overview

Una fría mañana de enero de 1967, en plena guerra civil de Guatemala, un comerciante judío y libanés es secuestrado en un callejón sin salida de la capital. Nadie ignora que Guatemala es un país surrealista, había afirmado años antes. Un narrador llamado Eduardo Halfon tendrá que viajar a Japón, revisitar su infancia en la Guatemala de los bélicos años setenta y acudir a un misterioso encuentro en un bar oscuro y lumpen, para finalmente dilucidar los detalles de la vida y el secuestro de aquel hombre que también se llamaba Eduardo Halfon y que era su abuelo. En este nuevo eslabón de su fascinante proyecto literario, el autor guatemalteco se adentra en la brutal y compleja historia reciente de su país, en la cual resulta cada vez más difícil distinguir entre víctimas y verdugos. Se añade así una importante pieza a su sutil exploración sobre los orígenes y los mecanismos de la identidad con la que ha logrado construir un inconfundible universo literario.

One cold morning in January 1967, in the midst of the civil war in Guatemala, a Jewish and Lebanese businessman is kidnapped in a dead end street in the capital. Nobody ignores that Guatemala is a surrealist country, he had affirmed years before. The narrator, named Eduardo Halfon, has to travel to Japan and there revisits his childhood in the Guatemala of the warlike seventies, and go to a mysterious meeting in a dark and lumpen bar, to finally elucidate the details of the life and kidnapping of that man who was also called Eduardo Halfon, and who was his grandfather. In this new link of his fascinating literary project, the Guatemalan author delves into the brutal and complex recent history of his country, where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between victims and executioners. He thus adds an important piece to his subtle exploration of the origins and mechanisms of identity with which he has managed to build an unmistakable literary universe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788417977559
Publisher:	Batiscafo
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Edition description:	Spanish-language Edition
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	409,436
Product dimensions:	7.70(w) x 4.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Language:	Spanish

About the Author

Eduardo Halfon is the author of The Polish Boxer, Monastery, Mourning, and Canción. He is the recipient of the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature, Roger Caillois Prize, José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel, International Latino Book Award, Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and Berman Literature Prize, among other honors. A citizen of Guatemala and Spain, Halfon was born in Guatemala City, attended school in Florida and North Carolina, and has lived in Nebraska, Spain, Paris, and Berlin.

Editorial Reviews

07/25/2022

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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Canción

Berman Literature Prize Winner
Cálamo Extraordinary Prize Winner
Big Other Book Award Finalist
Dublin Literary Award Longlist
Kirkus Reviews “Best Books of the Year” selection
World Literature Today “Notable Translations of the Year” selection

“There is something Bolañoesque about Halfon’s fictions, the way art and violence conspire to distort mythologies both personal and national. . . . The detective novel rubs elbows with the campus novel; tragedy cuts like acid through farce.” —New York Times Book Review

“The narrative of Canción unfolds in an elusive middle ground where heritage becomes porous. . . . [Halfon’s] métier is family: the way we are shaped by it and the way we push back on or move beyond it; how it both supports and limits us. . . . We are who we imagine we are, in other words, which is the faith that sits at the heart of family and literature.” —Los Angeles Times

“Extraordinary. . . . Establish[es] an affinity between fiction and autobiography that unsettles generic divisions.” —World Literature Today

“Gripping. . . . Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn’s translation, completed in consultation with Halfon, gracefully calls attention to Halfon’s insightful depiction of an identity-forming journey.” —Asymptote

“Doubles down on the possibilities that apprehending history can offer us the opportunity to rebuild our world and our relationships.” —Image

“At its core, Halfon’s work is elegiac. . . . Canción portrays the surprises the mind gives as gifts to itself when it is free to speculate and uncover the linkages obscured by grief and time itself.” —On the Seawall

“Canción brings us into the violence of 1960s Guatemala, not only through the violence of rebels and the government, but through the eyes of a family entwined in the midst of it all.” —North of Oxford

“An engrossing story of Jewish diaspora, secrets, and the multigenerational impacts of violence. . . . Dualities of beauty and horror, humor and darkness, and memory and truth all knock against each other to reveal the long-lasting effects of war, loss, and silence.” —Jewish Book Council

“What will impress readers are the narrator’s descriptions of life in Guatemala. . . . Those able to follow Halfon’s non-linear train of thought will have much to enjoy.” —The Reporter

“Exquisite. . . . A gorgeously rendered meditation on borderless identity, historical traumas and ongoing repercussions.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“Another minimasterpiece by a master of the form.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

More Praise for Eduardo Halfon’s Fiction

“Halfon is a brilliant storyteller.” —Daniel Alarcón

“Halfon’s prose is as delicate, precise, and ineffable as precocious art, a lighthouse that illuminates everything.” —Francisco Goldman

“Elegant.” —Marie Claire

“Engrossing.” —NBC Latino

“Fantastic.” —NPR Alt.Latino

“Deeply accessible, deeply moving.” —Los Angeles Times

“Offer[s] surprise and revelation at every turn.” —Reader’s Digest

“One senses Kafka’s ghost, along with Bolaño’s, lingering in the shadows. . . . [Halfon’s] books, which take on such dark subjects, are so enjoyable to read.” —New York Review of Books

“[Halfon’s hero] delights in today’s risible globalism, but recognizes that what we adopt from elsewhere makes us who we are.” —New York Times Book Review

“Halfon is a master of lithe, haunting semi-autobiographical novels.” —Jewish Book Council

“With [Halfon’s] slender but deceptively weighty books, which are at once breezy and melancholic, bemused and bitter, he opens up worlds to readers in return.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Halfon passionately and lyrically illustrates the significance of the journey and the beauty of true mystery.” —Booklist

“[Halfon’s narrator] may be the perpetual wanderer, but his meditations are focused and absorbing.” —Library Journal

“Halfon gives voice to a lesser-known sector of the Jewish diaspora, reminding us in the process of the ways in which identity is both fluid and immutable.” —Publishers Weekly

“Part Jorge Luis Borges, part Sholom Aleichem. . . . Roaming the ashes of the old country, uncovering old horrors, Halfon becomes an archaeologist of atrocity. His work is fiction clothed as memoir. His chronicles are his mourner’s Kaddish.” —Rumpus

“Robert Bolaño once said: ‘The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to (Andrés) Neuman and to a handful of his blood brothers.’ Eduardo Halfon is among that number.” —NewPages

From the Publisher

09/01/2022

In 1967, during the Guatemalan Civil War, rebels disguised as policemen and led by the eponymous Canción 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

Library Journal

★ 2022-06-22
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 Canción, 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.

Kirkus Reviews