Source: La Voz (Argentina)
06/25/2015 12:54

Eduardo Halfon: The Joys of the Traveler

Eduardo Halfon, a Guatemalan native, writes a hilarious and lucid journey of a trip to Israel in his book Monastery. Within the story he analyzes the religious intolerances in our global era. This novel is part of a larger project written by this world-renowned writer.

To what extent is all of your work part of a single literary project?

It is a project in which I’m not very conscious; it has been growing with time. It began in 2008, when I published The Polish Boxer (Pre-textos), a book that consists of six stories spun by an Eduardo Halfon who is very much like myself. The plot of that book is the history of my grandfather in relation to Auschwitz, a tattoo and a boxer. Two years later, in 2010 a story from that book turns into a short novel, La Pirueta. Monastery comes out of “White Smoke,” another story from Polish Boxer. The next book, Signor Hoffman, continues within this universe, in other words, there are four books for now, lined up, related, written by one single person who is looking for something, who travels a lot. All the books are about trips, either to Israel, Serbia or Poland. They are short books but related and intimate, some of them answer the questions in the others. What has been happening, which is interesting and fascinating, is that every country that has been translating my books, has been reformatting them. In the United States, The Polish Boxer includes La pirueta and Monastery to Signor Hoffman. In Japan, all four are published as a single book. Italy, Germany, France, every country is different. What I’ve been doing without knowing it, is writing one single book. They are all part of a larger project, which is called The Polish Boxer. That volume is the axis, the center and the core, which everything else revolves around.

To what degree are these actually travel accounts? How different are you from the Halfon who narrates the books?

I always begin with myself. I write like that. The birth of something intimate, the trip to Israel, my grandfather’s tattoo, the relationship with my father. But I’m not enough. I need to write about fiction in order to convey what I want, which is to give the reader an emotional ride. The other Eduardo, who is not me but really is me, who has my beard but smokes, I don’t smoke, is more daring and fearless, and responds to the taxi driver who says he wants to kill the Arabs. I would never do that, I’m more aloof, a coward if you must. The realest moments are not the events in my books, it’s not my sister’s wedding or the relationship I have with my brother. The realest moments are the fears, the awareness, and my childhood, that’s where I connect more closely with this narrator, more so then with the trips or events. But obviously everything arises from one person. My books are collections of stories from one narrator. They are episodes in one man’s life, they are all linked through the same voice, the same tone, the same man, and from there they can be ordered on top of the table in several ways.