Praise for Monastery
Best Translated Book Award Longlist
“A moving, reflective, and humbly resounding work of fiction. . . . As an ambassador of both worldly wonder and sublime storytelling, Eduardo Halfon’s Monastery, despite its brevity, is truly a marvel.” —Best Translated Book Award Longlist citation
More Praise for Eduardo Halfon’s Fiction
“Halfon is a brilliant storyteller.” —Daniel Alarcón
“Halfon’s prose is as delicate, precise, and ineffable as precocious art, a lighthouse that illuminates everything.” —Francisco Goldman
“Elegant.” —Marie Claire
“Engrossing.” —NBC Latino
“Fantastic.” —NPR Alt.Latino
“Deeply accessible, deeply moving.” —Los Angeles Times
“Offer[s] surprise and revelation at every turn.” —Reader’s Digest
“One senses Kafka’s ghost, along with Bolaño’s, lingering in the shadows. . . . [Halfon’s] books, which take on such dark subjects, are so enjoyable to read.” —New York Review of Books
“[Halfon’s hero] delights in today’s risible globalism, but recognizes that what we adopt from elsewhere makes us who we are.” —New York Times Book Review
“Extraordinary. . . . Establish[es] an affinity between fiction and autobiography that unsettles generic divisions.” —World Literature Today
“Halfon is a master of lithe, haunting semi-autobiographical novels.” —Jewish Book Council
“With [Halfon’s] slender but deceptively weighty books, which are at once breezy and melancholic, bemused and bitter, he opens up worlds to readers in return.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Halfon passionately and lyrically illustrates the significance of the journey and the beauty of true mystery.” —Booklist
“[Halfon’s narrator] may be the perpetual wanderer, but his meditations are focused and absorbing.” —Library Journal
“Halfon gives voice to a lesser-known sector of the Jewish diaspora, reminding us in the process of the ways in which identity is both fluid and immutable.” —Publishers Weekly
“Part Jorge Luis Borges, part Sholom Aleichem. . . . Roaming the ashes of the old country, uncovering old horrors, Halfon becomes an archaeologist of atrocity. His work is fiction clothed as memoir. His chronicles are his mourner’s Kaddish.” —Rumpus
“Robert Bolaño once said: ‘The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to (Andrés) Neuman and to a handful of his blood brothers.’ Eduardo Halfon is among that number.” —NewPages
2014-10-09
With this sly, quietly penetrating account of life on the road—a quasi-fictional journey containing sharp reflections on his Jewish ancestry—gifted young Guatemalan writer Halfon picks up where he left off with his acclaimed The Polish Boxer (2012).The narrator declares himself a "retired" Jew who "can't imagine a prayer, any prayer, having a meaning more profound than a mother's good-night kiss." During a visit to Jerusalem to attend his rigidly observant sister's wedding, he feels nothing when he touches the Western Wall. But for all his coldness toward religion, and his claim that "every journey is meaningless," this descendent of Polish and Lebanese grandparents is inspired by his travels and moved by his far-flung encounters with people who radiate belief. They include a Harlem woman who hosts private jazz concerts in her apartment "as a way of surviving Sundays," having lost her son; self-sufficient coffee growers in Guatemala who believe the quality of their beans reflects their own inner values; and, in her own way, a flight attendant he runs into in Israel with whom he's had an oddly erotic encounter in the past. One of this author's special attributes is never forcing meaning on his experiences, letting us judge the mundane factor of certain moments. But he's also great at reversing our initial impressions of people and places. A stone-faced border guard who denies the narrator passage into Belize shows different colors in a barroom. In the end, Halfon says, "Everyone decides how to save themselves." We can only be happy he decided to become a writer. A rising star among Latin writers, Halfon is a lively traveling companion, even at his most pessimistic.
