“Every fiction publisher is an impostor,” insists Eduardo Halfon near the end of his new book, “Canción. “It’s an admission and a challenge. Halfon, or his narrator, came to Tokyo to give a lecture on Lebanese literature. . The connection is tenuous at best. Yes, his paternal grandfather left Beirut in 1917, but that was 3 years before Lebanon was founded. It was still “part of Syrian territory. ” As for what this means for Halfon’s family, it deserves to be undeniable. “Legally,” he admits, “they were Syrians. ” But the undeniable is not always so undeniable: “They called themselves Lebanese. Perhaps his race or his people, as it was written in the logbook. Maybe like his identity. And so I am the grandson of a Lebanese who was not Lebanese. “.
Like so many of Halfon’s other writings, the narrative of “Song” unfolds on an elusive middle floor where the legacy becomes porous. For those who know your project, this will not be a surprise. He is a diaspora figure: born in Guatemala City, raised there and Florida and knowledgeable in North Carolina, he has lived in Europe and Nebraska. Their task is the family: how we are shaped through it and how we push it away or overcome it; how it supports and limits us at the same time. In “The Polish Boxer” (2012), his first ebook translated into English, this leads him to think of his other grandfather, who survived Auschwitz with the help of a fighter from his village. “Mourning,” his most recent book, revolves in part around his uncle Saloman, whose drowning in the formative years also resonates in “Song. “
What Halfon unearths is compelling is reminiscence and how it might or might not accumulate. In this sense, he works in the territory of autofiction, not so much through the creation of a narrative as through it to frame a set of investigations. He seeks a definitive story because he understands that no story can be definitive; We are all influenced by who we are and what we need to know. With “Canción”, it means to investigate the saga of the kidnapping of his grandfather, 4 years before the birth of the author, through Guatemalan rebels who held him as a ransom for 35 days
How do you build an ebook around a part of history that you haven’t witnessed, shrouded in mystery and even myth?Here we see the fictional side of autofiction – “Song” is classified as a novel – for Halfon such signifiers remain irrelevant. Instead, he is interested in the slow transition from one moment to the next. He structures his e-book as a series of interlocking digressions, jumping first from Japan to his grandparents’ sumptuous house in Guatemala City, where, in the late 1970s, at a dinner with Argentine cousins, the circle of relatives is interrupted by a detachment of soldiers, “serious, mustachioed, in their tight khaki uniforms. ” asking for an audience with “the boy of the house”.
Halfon’s first-person character is too young to know what happened; All he can describe is what he sees. This includes the soldiers, as well as the symbol of some other Solomon, who is not a blood relative but a member of the circle of relatives, reading a guest’s fortune in the grounds left in his coffee cup. Saloman does not reveal what he sees, an act of narrative reluctance that will resonate in the book. Remembering this moment, the narrator reminds us that we are forced to place meaning in the incomplete, even as it complicates our sense of time and space:
“Some circle of relatives thought they had noticed Nono’s imminent death. Others, who had noticed that Berenice and her parents were rushing back to Buenos Aires. Others, that I had noticed the mirrored image of the present, of that moment, of all those infantrymen who roamed space like wild beasts while one of them – they would tell me decades later – in the office, informing my grandfather of the end of one of the men who had kidnapped him in January 1967.
The effect of those lines, which go back in time as they project into the future, is that of a hieroglyph, with the surprising word “the last stop” providing a new breath of directionlessness. Surely it refers to the resting position of the kidnapper?Halfon, however, is less involved with how he died than with whom he died. What some of his cronies have claimed. This last reserve reminds us of the fragile terrain in which we are located.
Halfon increases the tension as he goes back and forth between the kidnapping itself and the narrator waiting, decades later, in a Guatemala City bar, for a source who will soon tell him: “I ask you to never, under any circumstances, write about what we are discussing. Very good?”
I’m not going to reveal what Halfon does with the information, whether he divulges it or not. But it is suggestive that you have to give your e-book the call of the hijacker, which is, in turn, consistent and an extra, either a catalyst and a mechanism of the plot. Without him, nothing happens: not only the kidnapping but also the dinner years later and even, one imagines, the training vacation to Tokyo. At the same time, Halfon keeps asking, what is Plot or narration?Are your consolations in the resolution, or in the questions it raises?
The answer is one or none. Or maybe all books are governed by their own rules. Lebanese Jew who long ago gave a guerrilla two dazzling gold pens, one last song before the blast of a last bullet explodes in the dark tropical night. We are what we think we are, that is, the religion that is at the center. of the circle of family and literature.
Every fiction is an impostor, in fact.
Ulin is a former editor and critic of The Times.
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