Flight (Eduardo Halfon)

Libros del Asteroide in Barcelona has released the seventh in a series of slim, elegant volumes by the writer Eduardo Halfon. Like the others, Tarántula explores in quasi-fictional form the complicated matter of being a Guatemalan-born secular Jew and descendent of Holocaust survivors.

Born in Guatemala in 1971, Halfon left the country as an adolescent when his family fled political turmoil there and resettled in Florida, where he temporarily adopted English as his preferred language. (He now writes in Spanish, but is apparently fully bilingual or more likely multilingual.) When he was thirteen, the narrator of Tarántula, who is also named Eduardo Halfon, was sent back to Guatemala, along with a younger brother, in order to attend a camp that taught survival skills, or, more pointedly, survival skills for Jews. The experience soon took a dark turn, and Halfon took to his heels, hiding in the countryside until he came across a sympathetic campesina. The book relates how, years later, he encountered a female fellow-camper and, eventually, had a confrontational meeting with the former director of the camp, a man with apparent ties to shadowy security organizations.

Eduardo Halfon has described how an interviewer once asked him, provocatively, which two books that he had not read had influenced him the most. In response, equally provocatively, he cited the Torah and the Popol Vuh, the latter being the foundational mythological scripture of Guatemalan indigenous culture.

When I mentioned to a friend this bizarre question-and-answer exchange with the Spanish journalist, she asked me why I didn’t just read both books now? Why did I still doggedly insist on not reading them? And I told her, with as much gravitas as I could muster, that if I did read them now I’d undoubtedly explode.

The truth, however, is that I don’t feel I need to. I already carry both of them with me, written somewhere inside me. The book of the Jews and the book of the Guatemalans, if I’m allowed that oversimplification, and if I can call books those two monumental works that represent and define my two worlds—the two great columns upon which my house is built. But a house that for some reason, ever since childhood, I needed to destroy or at least abandon. I can’t explain why I always felt that way, as if something was forcing me to run off and disappear.

I’ve spent an entire lifetime running away from home.

Halfon's declaration may or may not be strictly accurate; for one thing, he has provided a blurb for an illustrated edition of the Popul Vuh created by Ilan Stavans (a fellow Latin American writer of Jewish ancestry). Nevertheless, the powerful centripetal and centrifugal forces of influence and flight run through all of his work.

Tarántula is so far only available in Spanish (and several European languages), but an English-language edition is planned. The text of the above excerpt is available in English at the website of Tablet magazine.

Effingers (Coming Attractions)

One to watch out for: a promised English-language translation of Gabriele Tergit's family saga Effingers, which was originally published in Germany in 1951 but only recently "rediscovered" and reissued there to general acclaim. Robert Normen has a description on the website of The German Times:

In the best way, this epic 900-page novel resembles another historic family saga: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Mann’s story of four generations runs from 1835 to 1877. It may be no coincidence that Tergit’s book begins the very next year. Effingers is set against the backdrop of a changing German society steeped in the comforts of Bismarckian Prussia. Modernization and an economic boom bring affluence and changing norms, which are reflected in the contrasts between the city of Berlin and Karl’s and Paul’s small hometown in southern Germany. After World War I, anti-Semitic sentiment slowly but surely takes hold and the Effinger family must reluctantly learn that they are not the German clan they aspired to be.

NYRB Books has previously published a translation by Sophie Duvernoy of Tergit's earlier novel Käsebier Takes Berlin, and they have signed Duvernoy up for Effingers as well, though apparently no date has been announced. In the meantime, a snazzy-looking Spanish-language version has just been issued by Libros del Asteroide in Barcelona.

More information is available at The German Times.

The Memory Man

These three slender books by the Guatemalan Jewish writer Eduardo Halfon are published by Libros del Asteroide, a Barcelona-based company that publishes a wide range of modern literature, all in the same attractive format. Two of the three, or more accurately two and a half of the three, have been published in English translations by Bellevue Literary Press, along with another Halfon book (which I haven't read) entitled The Polish Boxer.

Each book succeeds as an individual work, but they're also part of a larger whole in which characters and events may be alluded to in one but more fully developed in another. Halfon, who spent part of his childhood in the US and is bilingual (though he doesn't do his own translations), has underlined the fluidity of his project by lifting sections of Signor Hoffman and combining them with the contents of Duelo for the US translation.

All three are narrated by someone named Eduard Halfon who is a Jewish-Guatemalan writer exploring the details and consequences of his personal and family history (but who should nevertheless not be confused with the author). Imagined events aren't necessarily deprecated in favor of real ones; thus Duelo (a title that can mean both "mourning" and "duel") centers around a half-remembered story about an uncle who drowned as a child in Lake Amatitlán. The fact that the drowning never happened both is and isn't less important than the ways it is (mis)remembered. The narrative begins in Guatemala but eventually travels to Florida and Germany (and to Italy and Poland in the English version).

The books have an understated force that becomes cumulative when they are read together (in whatever arrangement or order). Halfon doesn't bludgeon the reader, even when he deals with weighty matters (the Holocaust is a shadow over the entire enterprise), but instead prefers to work by indirection. His books echo each other but they also reverberate across entire fields of history.