In Canción, Eduardo Halfon's eponymous wanderer is invited to a Lebanese writers' conference in Japan, where he reflects on his Jewish grandfather's multifaceted identity. To understand more about the cold, fateful day in January 1967 when his grandfather was abducted by Guatemalan guerillas, Halfon searches his childhood memories. Soon, chance encounters around the world lead to more clues about his grandfather's captors, including a butcher nicknamed "Canción" (or song). As a brutal and complex history emerges against the backdrop of the Guatemalan Civil War, Halfon finds echoes in the stories of a woman he meets in Japan whose grandfather survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
Like so much of Halfon’s writing, the narrative of Canción unfolds in an elusive middle ground where heritage becomes porous ... What Halfon finds particularly compelling is memory and how it may or may not accrue. In that sense, he is working the territory of autofiction, not so much creating narrative as using it to frame a set of inquiries. He does not seek a definitive story because he understands no story can be definitive ... He structures his book as a series of nested digressions.
Despite this vertiginous crossing of countries and continents, the novella exists primarily in the borderless zone of memory. There is something Bolañoesque about Halfon’s fictions, the way art and violence conspire to distort mythologies both personal and national. A fluid, conversational translation by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn samples freely from various genres: The detective novel rubs elbows with the campus novel; tragedy cuts like acid through farce. The impossible alloy of identity is Halfon’s great subject, the anxiety that undergirds his compulsive restaging of the past.
Although Halfon wants us to feel the grip of history on our necks, his books aren’t pronunciamentos disguised as stories. His interest lies in how the remnants of family history, its anecdotes and remaining artifacts, influence one’s identity and manner of thought ... He lingers in the narrative’s atmosphere like a fog, a perennial menace whose violent work isn’t quite finished ... The psychic hyperactivity of Halfon’s narrator is mediated by the lucidity and stark elegance of his prose. Halfon can linger and expand on a detail, or step to the side for a lyrical rumination. At its core, Halfon’s work is elegiac, a reach toward times fading out. But it speaks out of the restive present and the instinctive effort to consider this, consider that. In short, 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.
