Eduardo Halfon, trans. by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn
RaveWorld Literature TodayThe narrator’s changing position along multiple ambiguous geographical, social, and cultural crossroads—he’s Jewish, Guatemalan, of Syrian or Lebanese descent, of a privileged economic class, and a writer who once studied engineering—mirrors this extraordinary novel’s combination of lucidity and structural sophistication, moving subtly as it does back and forth through several moments and places ... Canción’s portrayals of social and political complexity avoid easy judgment. The text’s insistence upon facing instead of concealing difficult truths about affiliations and origins makes plausible and important that which in the hands of a lesser writer would risk being trite.
Cristina Rivera Garza
RaveWorld Literature TodayEnglish-language readers finally have the chance to enter into the beguiling, menacing, and strangely poignant world that one of Mexico’s best writers creates through her short stories ... The consistently high quality of all the translations makes apparent not only the changes in Rivera Garza’s themes and style but also the way that the stories share an urgent search for meaning and connection ... Unfamiliar languages and uncanny spaces frustrate this search, and Rivera Garza’s frequent narrative distance and detached tone refuse easy intimacy. In its place lies a guiding tension between the desire to belong and an unsettling awareness of inhabiting landscapes defined by isolation, cruelty, prejudice, and catastrophe. Because they impede identification, the stories succeed at placing their characters and readers in similar states of disorientation. This in turn piques the reader’s interest and intensifies the characters’ desire for companionship and a place to call home.
