Canción
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From internationally celebrated Eduardo Halfon comes a new installment in his hero’s nomadic odyssey as he searches for answers surrounding his grandfather’s abduction
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.
Through exquisite prose and intricate storytelling, Halfon exposes the atrocities of war and the effect that silence and extreme violence have on family and identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the absurdist, scattershot latest from Halfon (The Polish Boxer), Beirut-born Jewish textile merchant Halfon's 1967 kidnapping in Guatemala shapes his Guatemalan writer grandson's legacy. The grandson Halfon, the narrator, relives his childhood in an attempt to understand why his grandfather was abducted by a butcher turned rebel fighter named Canción before the grandson was born. He interviews Canción's old comrades in a bar, trying to make sense of Guatemala's violent history. At a conference for Lebanese writers in Tokyo, which the narrator was invited to despite being neither Lebanese nor able to speak Arabic, audience members call him out as a fraud. The author plays the scene for laughs, though the theme of disguises recurs throughout. Meanwhile, the narrator all but falls in love with a conferee named Aiko, whose own grandfather also suffered wartime brutality. 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.
