The Polish Boxer

July 9, 2012
The main character in The Polish Boxer is named Eduardo Halfon, a Guatemalan writer and literature professor not unlike the book’s author, with the same name and biography. Thus right away, we’re in the murky half-light where fiction meets memoir meets memory and the impossibility thereof. It’s interesting territory, but it’s not immediately clear what that slippage does to enhance the loose skein of past and present events that befall Eduardo. What it does do is provide a built-in explanation for the lack of tidiness: these are the stories of life, not those of the more manufactured fictional version, the book suggests. Whether the stories are true is beside the point: they’re interesting in their own right. Eduardo suffers the bored contempt of his students; discovers the Mayan world that makes up the other Guatemala; finally learns the story of how his grandfather survived Auschwitz; and in the longest section, meets a traveling half-Serbian, half-Gypsy musician and then goes to Serbia to try to track him down. At the end, when his grandfather, the canny or lucky survivor, dies, and Halfon delivers a talk on how “literature tears through reality,” we come meandering back to the questions that, as we now understand, animate this book: the question of survival (of both people and cultures) and the way the fictional makes the real bearable and intelligible, if not always neat. Agent: Andrea Montejo, the Indent Literary Agency.

October 1, 2012

This ten-chapter work by a Guatemalan author now living in Nebraska defies classification. At first glance, it is an episodic, loosely arranged novel whose chapters are often autonomous, conveying the feel of several short stories tied together. But it also smacks of autobiography, as the protagonist shares the author's name. The plot concerns a Jewish Guatemalan literature professor who, after hearing a performance by a gifted Serbian pianist, feels compelled to travel to Serbia to visit him. Tacked on almost as an appendix is an account of the death of the author's grandfather, who was saved in Auschwitz by a Polish boxer, and this adds a provocative twist to the ending. The descriptions of the academic environment and the Serbian gypsy camp are vivid, based as they seem to be on real experiences. VERDICT This first English translation of Halfon's work is highly readable and engaging, partly owing to the careful work by a team of five translators; on an aesthetic note, its disruption of genre categories provides readers food for thought about the nature of literary creations.--Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2012
This strange and beautiful book at the outset defies definition. It is neither a collection of short stories or a novel but rather a tapestry of loosely connected movements that, when taken together, compose something haunting and enigmatic. The narrator, named, like the author, Eduardo Halfon, never seems to be in one place, nor is the time line clear. He is a literature professor tracking down a talented student, and a young man daring to ask his grandfather about the numbers tattooed on his arm, and then, in the longest narrative arc, a traveler searching the brothels of Belgrade for a gypsy pianist who may or may not be an old friend. But in almost all of these encounters, Halfon glides over the climactic and decisive moments, instead focusing almost entirely on the events leading up to a future we never have the privilege to visit. Rather than being inconclusive and unsatisfying, however, Halfon passionately and lyrically illustrates the significance of the journey and the beauty of true mystery. The Polish Boxer is sublime and arresting, and will linger with readers, who will be sure to revisit it again and again.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)