This is the fourth book in English translation from Eduardo Halfon who, I think, is technically a Guatemalan author but also man of many cultures and many places. In this small book–and they are all small books; which is some of the charm– our narrator, (who could also be our author…), is in Japan for a Lebanese writers conference, tells a story, set in Guatemala, of his grandfather’s run-in with the notorious gangster, Canción, known as “the Butcher”.

I love Halfon’s writing, and I enjoyed much of this this small novel; however, some of the content in this particular story is ugly and violent, which I found difficult to read and certainly didn’t enjoy on any level but it’s is part of the story, just be aware. ( )

Eduardo Halfon's Canción is a short collection of stories about his search to understand what happened to his grandfather. While the stories are easy to read, they are often meandering with little narrative structure.

Eduardo Halfon seems to intentionally blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction, a fact that might be backed up by the fact the publisher chose to buck the trend of writing "A Novel" on the cover. The book's constant habit of dropping historic figures is frustrating and almost reads as if he is clicking through Wikipedia pages on the Guatemalan Civil War. Although there are interesting vignettes, his insistence on putting them within his own family's story does not mesh.

In the book, Halfon is a jet-set writer who moves effortless between countries. His wealthy grandfather is kidnapped. Halfon encounters the kidnappers many years later in coincidental circumstances but is never able to put the story pieces together to create a full picture.

When David Stoll discovered that much of Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography had been plagiarized, she said that it was a community story and that indigenous Guatemalans view everyone's narratives as their own. Halfon seems to have done the same with Canción by taking bits and pieces of the stories of others and mixing it into his own story. ( )

Halfon uses an autofictional structure, characterized by random ruminations, to interrogate his history, family and sociopolitical context. He leaves most of it incomplete on purpose in the belief that stories can only give glimpses of meaning as these are governed more by personal identity and the questions being asked rather than by hard truths. This approach, however, imparts a disconcerting sense of time and place in the novel. Notwithstanding its unsettling feel, the narrative does foster a degree of tension and suspense. One is compelled to follow the trails of breadcrumbs Halfon drops just to see where they may lead.

Halfon’s eponymous narrator focusses on his grandfather’s kidnapping by rebels during 1967 Guatemalan revolution. "Everybody knows that Guatemala is a surreal country," his grandfather once presciently observed. Why was he seized? What did he experience? What motivated his ultimate release? How did the kidnapping affect him in later life? These questions serve as a context for Halfon’s inquiries into his own identity and that of Cancion, the man who kidnapped his grandfather. Cancion is a vaguely menacing figure in the novel. Was he a butcher, musician, singer, assassin or all of the above? What were the circumstances surrounding his murder? These are questions Halfon also does not fully resolve. Not unlike the author whose life took many twists, Cancion had multiple identities and a complex past.

Aiko, a colleague Halfon meets in Japan, tells him about her own grandfather who was mentally and physically scarred by the bombing of Hiroshima. At first, this seems like a diversion, but upon reflection, it represents a clear echo of Halfon’s own musings on how unacknowledged traumas can take on a life of their own for families.

The plot, such as it is, is set in Japan at a writers’ conference but meanders back and forth to Guatemala City where Halfon reminisces about salient events in his past and meets with an informer in a dark bar. “I’m asking you to never, under any circumstances,” this person warns, “write anything about what we discuss. Alright?” This book stands as a testament to that promise being unkept. ( )

Eduardo Halfon is one of the best known contemporary Guatemalan authors, who was born in Guatemala City in 1971, spent his first 10 years there until he and his family moved to the United States, where he attended North Carolina State University as an Industrial Engineering major, and then returned to Guatemala to teach literature at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala City. His novels have won or were listed as finalists for several literary awards, including the Guatemalan National Prize for Literature and the International Latino Book Award, and in 2007 he was named one of the 39 best young Latino writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá. Three of his previous novels have been translated into English and published by Bellevue Literary Press, namely The Polish Boxer, his most famous work, Monastery and Mourning, which are all works of autofiction centered on the life of his paternal grandfather, a Jewish man born in what is now Lebanon who fled with his family in 1917 to NYC to escape a devastating famine, and subsequently emigrated to Guatemala in the 1940s.

Canción, which is the Spanish word for ‘song’, begins with the intriguing sentence “I arrived in Tokyo disguised as an Arab.” The narrator, Eduardo Halfon, is invited to a Lebanese writers’ conference in Tokyo, as the organizers mistakenly believe that he is Lebanese, a country that he has never visited. Halfon tells the audience about his paternal grandfather, and he uses this to reflect on his PGF’s past life, particularly his kidnapping in 1967, a few years before Halfon was born. This episode occurred during the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 to 1996 and was sparked by a coup d’état by leftist soldiers who were in opposition to the military government that came to power after a covert operation by the CIA led to the overthrow of Guatemala’s first democratically elected president, Juan José Arévalo, after he instituted land reforms to return land to peasants who were displaced after the United Fruit Company, a United States multinational corporation, was given their land by previous Guatemalan leaders. Halfon’s grandfather, a wealthy businessman, was kidnapped by guerrillas during an ambush, and he was ultimately released after his family paid a large ransom for his release. In addition to Halfon’s grandfather, the novel is mainly centered on two men: Benito Cáceres Domínguez (Beni), a friend of his grandfather’s and a military man who aids Halfon in his compulsory enrollment in the Guatemalan Army, who is a member of an elite wing of the army during the civil war which brutally massacred the members of an indigenous community in retaliation for a deadly assault on a group of soldiers; and Percy Amílcar Jacobs Fernández, nicknamed Canción, who was one of the guerrillas who kidnapped Halfon’s grandfather. By telling these men’s stories Halfon provides the reader with a compelling look into Guatemala during and after the civil war, and the devastation that it had on the country, and the members of one family.

Canción was a superb novel, the first one I’ve read by Eduardo Halfon, and I eagerly look forward to reading the two other books I own by him, The Polish Boxer and Monastery.

Thank you to Bellevue Literary Press for providing me with an uncorrected proof of Canción in exchange for an honest review of it. ( )

Eduardo Halfon's books are a pastiche of experiences, memories, family stories, and invention. His narrator, also Eduardo Halfon, both mirrors him and allows him to go beyond himself. It's impossible to tease out what is fact and what is fiction. And yet, I find it works.

...Imposter, he said in English. I was unsure whether the old novelist had said it in jest or was serious, and smiling, I told him that every writer of fiction is an imposter. Then a journalist in jacket and tie announced solemnly—without looking at me—that he couldn't see what sense it made to recount, there, at a conference of Lebanese writers, the story of a Guatemalan farmer and his herd of cows. An older woman, a literature professor, jumped up to defend me, sort of, telling the journalist—also without looking at me and talking about me as if I wasn't there—that Halfon did the same thing in his writing, that all his stories seemed to lose the thread and never go anywhere. I didn't say anything, though I could have said this: The photographer Cartier-Bresson, in order to determine the artistic merit of an image, always looked at it upside down. Or I could have said this: The best stories as Verdi knew, are written in A-flat major...

To me, the five stories in this book, hang together as a whole, and I was surprised to learn that other publishers internationally have concatenated them differently. This English translation includes The Conference, The Bedouin, Beni, Canción (the longest, comprising half the book), and Kimono on the Skin.

The book opens with the narrator attending the conference referenced above. Halfon's grandfather was born in then-Syria, now-Lebanon and through this tenuous connection, the invitation to speak was made. The irony of a Guatemalan Jew of Syrian descent being asked to speak at a Japanese conference of Lebanonese writers is not lost on the narrator, yet it is also not uncommon. The author-narrator has lived in the US, Spain, Paris, and Berlin, and is frequently described in various combinations. The idea of identity being amorphous and changeable runs throughout Halfon's works. This tension of things not being what they appear to be allows the author to play with language in interesting ways.

And this, according to some of his comrades, was one of Canción's most peculiar characteristics: his manner of speaking, his way of expressing himself in short, cryptic, almost poetic phrases. He would rarely utter a long or even a complete sentence, and rarely was the meaning of his words in fact their literal meaning.

Names, identities, stories: everything is a front for something else. Meaning is layered and context-derived.

In the second story, the narrator-author introduces us to his family, rooting the narrative both in Guatemala and in Jewish culture. It also begins the family legend, told over the course of the book, of his grandfather's kidnapping by Guatemalan guerillas in 1967, during the brutal, decades-long civil war. This is the plot thread that hangs everything together and forms the backbone of the next two stories as well.

The final story bookends the work, by bringing us back to the conference. The narrator meets a Japanese woman whose grandfather survived the bombing of Hiroshima. The themes of generational trauma, family secrets, and the societal effects of war are heightened by this extreme example.

I read Halfon's Monastery earlier this summer, and it features this same hybrid narrator who travels widely, yet never strays far from Guatemala. In some ways, they, and I suspect most of Halfon's works, are really extensions and complements of one another. In fact, one publisher has released four of his novels together as one. That said, I liked Canción even more than his early work. It is incredibly rich and hangs together well. I can't wait to read more.

Edited same day to fix formatting. ( )