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.
The 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.
Exquisite ... Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, who have translated previous books by Halfon, work in consultation with the author. The results are nonlinear vignettes that cross decades, countries, characters and world events in a gorgeously rendered meditation on borderless identity, historical traumas and ongoing repercussions.
Absurdist, scattershot ... 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.
