CANCIÓN by Eduardo Halfon; trans. by Lisa Dillman & Daniel Hahn

CANCIÓN

Halfon, Eduardo Trans. by Lisa Dillman & Daniel Hahn Bellevue Literary Press (160 pp.) $17.99 paper | Sept. 20, 2022 978-1-954276-07-9

Fiction coats reality—or is it the other way around?—in Halfon’s brief but eventful account of life during Guatemala’s bloody civil war.

The book opens with Halfon, a Guatemalan Jew, attending a Lebanese writers conference in Tokyo “disguised as an Arab.” He knows only a few words of Arabic and has negligible ties to Lebanon but accepts a rather curious invitation to the confab because he has never been to Japan. Thus begins an unusual family saga centered on his paternal grandfather, who was born in Beirut when it was still part of Syria and fled the city with his family as a teenager. Eduardo Halfon (same name as his grandson) becomes a wealthy textile manufacturer in Guatemala, where he is kidnapped in 1967 by a leftist guerrilla (and former butcher) known as Canción, held for ransom for 35 days, and released. All in all, not the worst outcome in a country where government commando forces were dropping innocents, including a living 3-month-old baby, into a dry well and sledgehammering or shooting children who were told they were being taken out of church to get vaccinated. “I wanted to put my fingers in my ears and be deaf and so not have to hear those voices,” writes Halfon, who is referring to the intrusive noise of soldiers bursting into his grandfather’s house but could be referring to any number of traumatizing moments. As in previous works of autobiographical fiction, including The Polish Boxer (2012) and Mourning (2018), Halfon, who spent much of his childhood in Florida and attended college in the U.S., draws us into this nightmarish world with his understated conversational style. “Everybody knows that Guatemala is a surreal country,” his grandfather wrote in a letter to a local newspaper, but the younger Halfon makes the horrors all too real.

Another minimasterpiece by a master of the form.

THE OTHER SIDE OF NIGHT

Hamdy, Adam Atria (304 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 27, 2022 978-1-9821-9618-9

Harriet “Harri” Kealty is having a hard time. The love of her life has left her high and dry. She’s lost her job as a police officer after the man who attacked her partner dies under mysterious circumstances. To top it all off, she’s obsessed with what appears to be a murder-suicide in which her former beau is the prime suspect.

For about three-quarters of its length, this British thriller balances twists and turns with weighty matters of fate, regret, grief, and longing. It’s a multimedia production, with narrative bites coming from court transcripts, transcribed video tapes, good old-fashioned letters, and a third-person omniscient narrator. It keeps the reader guessing, as a thriller is supposed to. And then it falls off a cliff, much as one of its characters does. It hints at a possible science-fiction element throughout; three of its main characters are high-level scientists, and the novel leaves a trail of breadcrumbs suggesting that their work might come into play. When it does, the results are kind of interesting, then quite imaginative, as long as you don’t think about it too much. Then the author explains. And explains. And explains. Harri all but vanishes for multiple pages at a time. Come back, Harri! She does, eventually, but by then the reader is swimming in scientific theory and wrestling with the book’s wordy take on the space-time continuum. It’s admirable when an author is willing to take a leap, but this one happens so fast and switches the novel’s tone (not to mention its genre) so completely that the reader might wonder what happened to that lean thriller they were just reading. The novel ultimately gets so mired in

WORDS WITH… K-Ming Chang

The author of Gods of Want writes stories that scare her—in a good way

BY HANNAH BAE

Kristin Chang

K-Ming Chang likes to say that she writes about “queer daughterhood”—the family ties that bind lineages of women through reinvention, love, and lore. It’s a rich theme that courses through her wildly imaginative new story collection, Gods of Want (One World/Random House, July 12), as well as her debut novel, Bestiary (2020), both of which received starred reviews from Kirkus. In Gods of Want, Chang deploys lyrical prose to tell stories of Taiwanese immigrant families that veer into the surreal and surprising, with magazine ads that can spring to life and schoolgirls who can swallow each other whole.

Chang spoke to us via Zoom from northern California, where she had stopped on a road trip that she’d planned with meticulous detail. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Are you a planner, both in life and in your writing? I use a Japanese planner called the Hobonichi really intensely, and I treasure it like a security blanket. But I’m the opposite when it comes to writing. I have to not know where I’m going. It has to feel like play. If I ever try to outline to create the shape of a story, I find I lose my sense of motivation and playfulness toward it.

Writing this book was a serendipitous event. I was writing all of these stories for the longest time, and there was a constant feeling of discovery with dovetailing images, words, and sounds. There were a lot of M words— melons, including a character named Melon; mothers; moons; mouths. I love wordplay and the microunit of the word. Once I started playing with these microunits and seeing the recurrence of all these M words, that’s when I started to feel the associative process of sectioning the book into “Mothers,” “Myths,” and “Moths.” The triptych appealed to me.

You teach classes in flash fiction. How does this form play out in this book? I originally wrote certain moments in these stories as stand-alone flash pieces. As I was revising, I was particularly stuck on stories like “Mariela,” which is now my favorite story in the collection, and “Nüwa,” which is about a [mythical] snake train. I had these revision plans—written in my planner!—and they felt so not alive to me anymore. Many weeks went by, and I decided to write some flash pieces because that’s the most organic kind of writing that I can immediately enter, and I ended up writing two back-to-back. I wondered if they could be a suite of linked pieces, but then I copied and pasted the first one into “Nüwa,” then put the second one into “Mariela.” They were exactly what I needed for both stories. The writing was showing me thematically where these stories needed to go and what they were really about at their core. Flash [writing] allows you to discover the meaning of something. [In the book,] those flash pieces are published almost exactly in their original forms; I just added the character names. This sort of thing has never happened to me as a writer before, and I feel like it’s a haunted moment in creating this collection that scared me in a good way.

What inspires the way you play with words? I discover the most joy in writing when I’m thinking about what’s the next word or how to begin a sentence, more than the delight of constructing narrative, which seems to happen incidentally or through labor. I’m always trying to ambush myself and create moments of being jolted, surprised, or shocked that keep me moving through the writing.

Recently, reading fiction in translation has been most inspiring and influential for my own work. I find that after I read something in translation, I’ll come away thinking, I didn’t know this was possible. I didn’t know you could make sentences this way. Anything could be possible, and that’s delightful and interesting to me. There are so many more ways to tell a story than what I have been taught and had internalized as the only way to tell a story. In translated fiction, there’s something about the language that feels both deeply familiar and offkilter in some way. Because I delight in the unexpected, I find myself literally translating dialogue or idioms from Mandarin, and people will say, Oh my God, that’s so creative. How did you come up with that?

I’m taking an amazing Taiwanese literature class online with the literary translator and writer Jenna Tang, and we were talking about how much poop is involved in Taiwanese slang and language. It’s really normalized, and it signals intimacy, which I get into in Bestiary as well. Talking about your body in this way is a kind of love language. For the women in this collection, bodily and physical intimacy is embedded in everything that they do.

You are not afraid to write about the grotesque, about bodily fluids and emissions, subjects that I’ve seen discouraged in literary writing. Did you have to push to keep these parts? I’m interested in bringing lyricism and poetry to things that are considered crass or disgusting. My editor, Nicole Counts, and my agent, Julia Kardon, really understood that was deeply embedded in my style. In some ways, I felt freed by other women writers and queer writers being scatological, like Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart or Ottessa Moshfegh’s work. There is something about aversion and disgust that is so similar to attraction and fascination. I felt there was something queer about being so averse to something because you’re deeply attracted to it. I experienced that a lot as a child, how the feeling of wonder and feeling of horror were similar physical sensations. What does it mean to see this really disgusting thing as deeply beautiful or worthy of looking at closely, and what does that reveal about the consciousness of the character?

I noticed that you dedicated your book to your writing group: Amy Haejung, Pik-Shuen Fung, Kyle Lucia Wu, and Annina Zheng-Hardy. How does community nurture you as a writer? My writing group has been one of the most transformative things for my writing. These are really the people I want to be writing for. I’m a big fan of writing for your friends, for the people who are interested in what you are doing. This group is very into experimentation, play, and making writing very low stakes. I find this has helped me discover a new kind of intimacy around writing, with people who know a lot of details about my life.

I met Pik-Shuen [author of the novel Ghost Forest] at a Kundiman Retreat [for Asian American writers], and we started talking months later about forming a writing group. I’d always wanted to be in one, but I had been mildly traumatized by certain forms of feedback. But we make our own rules and have been meeting consistently for years. We’ve become pen pals in a way, because we all used to be in New York City but now we’re spread out. Yet as we’ve spread out, we continue to find each other in our own locations, sending each other rogue emails of well wishes and pictures of each others’ books in the wild. This kind of intimacy is not talked about that often in terms of the writing process.

Hannah Bae is a Korean American writer, journalist, and illustrator and winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Gods of Want received a starred review in the May 15, 2022, issue.

plot exposition that the ending seems further away the closer you get.

Too much exposition stalls a promising thriller.

LARK ASCENDING

House, Silas Algonquin (288 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 27, 2022 978-1-64375-159-7

A young man heads across the Atlantic, seeking refuge on a rapidly collapsing planet. We meet 20-year-old Lark, the narrator of House’s seventh novel, on an overcrowded yacht full of refugees headed from Maine to Ireland. Climate change has sparked devastating fires across America, and aggressive, heavily armed militias enforce a hard-line religious doctrine that makes Lark a target as a gay man. After an arduous trek across the sea that kills many of the passengers, including both of his parents, Lark arrives in Ireland on little more than a rumor that he’ll have a safe haven in Glendalough, a spiritually blessed place said to be both progressive and spared the worst of the climate disaster. Along the way he befriends a dog—a rare creature now in this cruel hellscape—and a woman savvy about the landscape and its threats. House delivers this straightforward adventure with efficiency and poignancy, capturing the brief idyll of freedom Lark and his family enjoyed before leaving and the newfound appreciation he has for an environment and liberal society that are both rapidly collapsing. And the novel’s style has a clarity and rough-hewn simplicity that bring the story’s conflicts into sharp relief. (It’s no accident that the dog is named Seamus, a tribute to the Irish Nobel winner Seamus Heaney, the earthiest of great Irish poets.) The novel’s chief flaw is its overfamiliarity, to the point of almost feeling like a pastiche of dystopian-novel plots and styles: At various points the story contains echoes of The Dog Stars, I Am Legend, The Road, American War, Station Eleven, and more. House seamlessly works in present-day concerns about rampant fundamentalism and willful ignorance about climate catastrophe, but for anybody well versed in the genre, this will feel like well-trod ground.

A cleareyed and engaging, if familiar, apocalyptic yarn.

THE FORTUNES OF JADED WOMEN

Huynh, Carolyn Atria (272 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-9821-8873-3

A contemporary Vietnamese American family in Southern California deals with the fallout of an ancient curse. The three Dương sisters of Orange County’s Little Saigon community have a lot in common, from a passion for knockoff Louis Vuitton bags and real jade to a distinct inability to revere their elders as much as they should. They’re also estranged—from each other, from their mother, from their grown daughters (who are well on their way to becoming estranged, too). But the alienation isn’t random. Long ago, an ancestor named Oanh fled her marriage after falling in love with a Cambodian man, and her husband’s vengeful mother put a curse on all Oanh’s descendants. Now, happiness is destined to elude them. If they marry, their spouses will be bad husbands, and they will never have sons, an affront to tradition. But when a mysterious psychic tells Mai Nguyễn, the oldest, that the time has come to mend fences with her sisters, Minh Phạm and Khuyến Lâm, changes seem to be on the horizon. The new year, the psychic says, will bring a wedding, a funeral, and, finally, the birth of a son, a bold prediction that scrambles the fates of this sprawling, squabbling family of women. Written with crackling humor and a shrewd, intimate understanding of Vietnamese American family life, the book is full of tart, broad comedy and farcical setups. But first-time

“Two children observe and embody the liberating yet risky social experiment of communal living on an English farm.”

amy & lan

novelist Huynh also uses her gift for humor as a tool to tell a unique story about exile and assimilation, highlighting the perils of trying to bend newer generations to ancient traditions and the difficulty of reconciling culture with the messy truths of modern American life. You will laugh along with the Dươngs, but you’ll also find yourself cheering for their reconciliation as they learn “there was nothing wrong with having Vietnamese daughters. It was how the world treated them that turned it into a curse.”

A funny, sharp, and insightful look at family bonds and the effects of tradition on modern life.

AMY & LAN

Jones, Sadie Harper (320 pp.) $25.99 | Aug. 16, 2022 978-0-06-324-090-2

Two children observe and embody the liberating yet risky social experiment of communal living on an English farm. “We’ve always dreamed of doing that….Living in the countryside,” comments a visitor about Frith, the jointly owned farmstead that sits at the center of Jones’ latest novel. The rural idyll—living in an environmentally friendly, self-sufficient, socially blended fashion—is the enviable achievement of three couples, the Honeys, Cornells, and Hodges, assisted by their children and a couple of late add-ons, after they bought this cluster of buildings on 78 acres. Amy and Lan are the oldest of the children, a girl and a boy born in different families soon after the Frith adventure begins, and it’s from their twin