Mourning

Starred review from April 1, 2018
In his latest autobiographical novel to be translated into English, Guatemalan native Halfon's same-named alter ego continues his far-flung travels to probe hidden family truths dating back to Nazi concentration camps.The author, whose family relocated to the United States when he was 10, is as much instigator as investigator. Against the wishes of his maternal grandfather, a Polish Jew, Halfon visits the Lodz neighborhood where the old man lived before the Gestapo took him away (and where a former porn star now lives in his old place). Returning to Guatemala, he tries to determine whether it was his father's brother Salomón who died at age 5 in a swimming accident there. Other Salomóns, including another 5-year-old who died an identical death, spin through the narrative. For Halfon the storyteller, unsolved mysteries and the freest of free associations satisfy his aims better than established facts. Halfon goes by "Hoffman" after someone mistakenly calls him that name--very possibly, Halfon determines, at the exact moment beloved actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died in New York. "Language is also a diving helmet," Halfon writes in recalling how worlds opened to him when he first learned English. With his slender but deceptively weighty books, which are at once breezy and melancholic, bemused and bitter, he opens up worlds to readers in return.In this follow-up to The Polish Boxer (2012) and Monastery (2014), Halfon constructs a kind of postmodern memorial to his grandfathers, who outlived the horrors of the Holocaust but not its searing emotional aftereffects.

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June 1, 2018

As in The Polish Boxer and its sequel, Monastery, Halfon makes fiction of memoir, as his protagonist (named Eduardo Halfon) continues tracing his roots. Investigating the mystery of his uncle Salomón's drowning as a child, which proves not to be what it seems (resonating differently, yet still resonating, with life's ongoing tragedy), Halfon uncovers hidden tension within his father's Lebanese-Jewish family, immigrants to Guatemala and America. Meanwhile, he travels to Italy for an unsettling conference at a reconstructed concentration camp and to Poland, where he visits the home of his maternal grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. Why pick apart the past? He's not sure, but the journey is half the point, clarifying in fluid, accessible language that however slippery, memory is essential to who we are. VERDICT For readers interested in family, memory, 20th-century history, and strong literature.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 18, 2018
Halfon (The Polish Boxer) spins a bewitching tale of a man named Eduardo Halfon who travels half the globe on a quest to understand his dark family history. His journey begins in Calabria, where he visits a place not widely associated with Italy: a concentration camp. Halfon the narrator, a Spanish-speaking Jew, is ostensibly in Italy to speak about a book he wrote about how his Polish grandfather survived the Holocaust, but his exploits reveal his need to more viscerally understand this tragic experience. In this vein, he goes to Łódź, Poland, where his grandfather was captured by the Gestapo in 1939 at the age of 19. While his grandfather had discouraged him from ever visiting, he told Halfon the address of his former home during their final conversation. He finds the apartment, which he has long felt driven to see, though he struggles to articulate why. After leaving Poland, he visits his Lebanese grandparents’ lake home in Guatemala to investigate a tragedy from that side of his family: his Uncle Salomón’s childhood drowning. What he finds is unexpected and gives new dimension to the roles that secrets and memory play in his family. Careful, arresting prose brings everything together in a moving, evocative story of the narrator’s bloodline.