Source: lavoz.com
CIUDAD DE EQUIS 06/25/2015 12:54 P.M.
By: Javier Mattio
Eduardo Halfon: The Joys of the Traveler
Brief but with sharp turns, the work of Eduardo Halfon (Guatemala, 1971) feeds on itself in the manner of a snowball; as entertaining and enigmatic, so light and yet labyrinthine. Judaism, nomadism, the global reality, the chronicle, the humor, and the family history are some of the topics of Monasterio (Libros del Asteroide), the third and not be missed work of a pseudo-autobiographical saga in the works which completes El boxeador polaco, La pirueta, and the imminent, Signor Hoffman. Based on the narratives of Eduardo Halfon’s diary of a trip to Israel to celebrate his sister’s marriage, Monasterio functions as a humorous introspective, a sense of searching for individual identity and the dissection of Orthodox Judaism.
-To what extent is this work considered a literary project?
-It is a project which I am not very conscious of, it has been growing right before my eyes. It began in 2008, when I published El boxeador polaco (Pre-Textos), a six-story book put together by an Eduardo Halfon very similar to me. The narrative link to that book is the story of my grandfather in relation to Auschwitz, a tattoo, and a boxer.
Two years later, in 2010, a story of that book becomes a short novel, La pirueta. Monasterio arises from another tale of El boxeador…”, “Fumata blanca”. The forthcoming book, Signor Hoffman is still within that universe, so it’s up to four books now, put together, related, and narrated by the same character, someone who is in search of something and who travels a lot. There is a trip in all the books, a trip to Israel, Serbia, and Poland. They are related short stories, intertwined, some respond to issues of the other. And the curious and most fascinating thing that’s been happening is that every country that has translated the stories, has also reformatted the books. In the United States, El boxeador polaco includes La pirueta and Monasterio includes Signor Hoffman. In Japan, the four stories are contained in one book. In Italy, Germany, and France, each country is different. What I’ve been doing without knowing is writing a single book. All the books are part of a larger literary piece called El boxeador polaco. That volume is the hub, the center, the nucleus around which everything else revolves.
-Up to what point the travel accounts in this work is considered as such? How much do you distance yourself from Halfon the narrator?
-I always start from within myself. I write this way as well. I start off from something intimate; the trip to Israel, my grandfather’s tattoo, the relationship with my father. But this is not enough. I need to use fiction to convey what I want, which is to provide the reader an emotional journey. That other Eduardo who’s not me, but yet it is, that has a beard, but smokes, I don’t smoke, is more daring, agile, retaliates back to the taxi driver that says he wants to kill the Arabs. I would never do that, I am more elusive, more of a coward if you’d prefer. The autobiographical elements are not the facts in my books, it is not the wedding of my bother or my relationship with him. The autobiographical elements are the fears, the sensitivity, and my childhood, that’s where I come closer to the narrator and not with the tales of the trips nor the facts. But obviously everything starts from within me. My books are collections of stories of a single narrator. They are episodes in the life of one character, related to the same voice, the same tone, the same man, and from there on forward, they can be arranged in different ways.
