Source: La Voz Ciudad Equis
June 25, 2015, 12:54 pm
Eduardo Halfon: A Traveler’s Joys
Guatemalan Eduardo Halfon narrates a hilarious and lucid journey to Israel in Monastery, in which he dissects religious intolerance on a global level. The novel is part of a saga that has made the author world renowned.
By Javier Mattio
To what extent is all of your work part of a greater literary project?
It is a project that I was not conscious of but has grown before me. It began in 2008, when I published El boxeador polaco (Pre-textos–The Polish Boxer), a novel with six stories woven together by Eduardo Halfon, who is a lot like me. The thread in this novel is the story of my grandfather in relation to Auschwitz, a tattoo and a boxer. Two years later in 2010, a story from this book becomes another novel, La pirueta. Monastery develops from another story in The Polish Boxer, “White Smoke.” The next novel, Signor Hoffman, continues in this universe, so now there are four books woven, interconnected and narrated by the same character who is in search of something, and who travels a lot. All of the books are a journey to Israel, Serbia and Poland. They are short novels that are intimately related, some answer questions that arise in the others. What is curious and fascinating is that each country that translates my novels reformats it. In the United States, The Polish Boxer includes La pirueta and Monastery includes Signor Hoffman. In Japan, the four novels make up one book. In Italy, Germany, and France each country formats them differently. What I have been doing without knowing it, is writing one book. All of the novels are a part of a greater project titled The Polish Boxer, this novel is the center and nucleus surrounding the others.
How much of this project is a travel account? How distant are you from the narrator Halfon?
I always begin with myself. I write this way, inspired from my childhood and something intimate, like the journey to Israel, my grandfather’s tattoo and the relationship with my father but I am not enough. I need fiction in order to convey what I want, which is to take the reader on an emotional journey. That other Eduardo that is not me but is me, who has my bear but smokes unlike me, is more bold, fearless, and responds to the taxi driver who says he wants to kill the Arabs. I would never do that, I am more aloof, even cowardly. The most autobiographical elements of my novels are not the events that take place, such as my sister’s wedding or my relationship with my brother. Instead they are the fears, sensitivities and my childhood, in these moments I resemble the narrator most than in those journeys and events. Evidently everything comes from me. My novels are collections of stories from a single unique narrator. They are episodes in the life of one character, linked by the same voice, the same tone, the same man, and from there they can be rearranged differently.
