Recensori in anteprimaLisa Dillman

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.

“Extraordinary. . . . Establish[es] an affinity between fiction and autobiography that unsettles generic divisions.” —World Literature Today

“Another minimasterpiece by a master of the form.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller.” —Daniel Alarcón “The hero of Halfon’s novel delights in today’s risible globalism, but recognizes that what we adopt from elsewhere makes us who we are.” —New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” selection “Tight and lean . . . falling somewhere between the novels of Roberto Bolaño, WG Sebald, and Junot Díaz.” —Telegraph In Mourning, a mysterious family tragedy inspires Eduardo Halfon’s eponymous narrator on a journey across the globe and through the tangled memories of childhood to discover what, or who, really killed his uncle Salomón. As he goes deeper, he realizes that the truth lies buried in his own past, in the brutal Guatemala of the 1970s and his subsequent exile to the American South. Subtle and stirring, Mourning is a reflection on the formative and destructive power of family mythology, silence, and loss.

The journey continues for the hero of the acclaimed The Polish Boxer In Eduardo Halfon’s first novel The Polish Boxer, the nomadic narrator brought readers along on the search for his origins, demonstrating how stories change and evolve. In Monastery, the hero returns to travel from Tel Aviv, where his sister’s Jewish Orthodox wedding is being held, to the highland coffee plantations of Guatemala, and then from the jazz haunts of Harlem to the French Breton coast, where he dreams of Chekhov in an attempt to retrace his grandfather’s path. Along the way, he’s confronted by authority, isolation, history’s atrocities, and the burdens of his heritage. As he moves through the chaos of the world, and the intolerance he finds both within and without, he comes to realize that “a wall is never bigger than the spirit of those it confines.” Praise for The Polish Boxer “Elegant” —Marie Claire “Deeply accessible, deeply moving.” —Los Angeles Times “Tight and lean . . . falling somewhere between the novels of Roberto Bolaño, WG Sebald, and Junot Díaz.” —Telegraph “Funny and revelatory. . . . The hero of Halfon’s novel delights in today’s risible globalism, but recognizes that what we adopt from elsewhere makes us who we are.” —New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice citation

The English-language debut of a major Latin American writer The Polish Boxer is a semi-autobiographical tale about roots and origins: the subtly subversive longing for lost identity, the emotionally treacherous territory of cultural exile, and the lingering legacy of history’s atrocities. As the narrator—a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon—travels from small Mayan villages to a Scottish bar in Antigua, and from a Mark Twain conference in North Carolina through the memories of his Polish grandfather’s nightmare at Auschwitz and to a Gypsy neighborhood in Serbia, he encounters people whose stories are as rich and diverse as the languages they speak. PRAISE “Eduardo Halfon’s prose is as delicate, precise, and ineffable as precocious art—a lighthouse that illuminates everything.” —Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name “These are the stories of life . . . the question of survival (of both people and cultures) and the way the fictional makes the real bearable and intelligible.” —Publishers Weekly, (boxed review)

A transporting and brilliant comic novel narrated by an unforgettable woman: Karen Nieto, an autistic savant whose idiosyncrasies prove her greatest giftsAs intimate as it is profound, and as clear-eyed as it is warmhearted, Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World marks an extraordinary debut by the award-winning Mexican playwright, journalist, and poet Sabina Berman.Karen Nieto passed her earliest years as a feral child, left alone to wander the vast beach property near her family's failing tuna cannery. But when her aunt Isabelle comes to Mexico to take over the family business, she discovers a real girl amidst the squalor. So begins a miraculous journey for autistic savant Karen, who finds freedom not only in the love and patient instruction of her aunt but eventually at the bottom of the ocean swimming among the creatures of the sea. Despite how far she's come, Karen remains defined by the things she can't do—until her gifts with animals are finally put to good use at the family's fishery. Her plan is brilliant: Consolation Tuna will be the first humane tuna fishery on the planet. Greenpeace approves, fame and fortune follow, and Karen is swept on a global journey that explores how we live, what we eat, and how our lives can defy even our own wildest expectations.