05 Dec 2012 23:27:52
It is important to admit that, at first, I didn't really like this book: its opening chapter had been translated almost aggressively into American ("goddam", "jackass", and so on), and I knew and rather liked this publisher for its impressive devotion to Mitteleuropa. Guatemala, which is where Eduardo Halfon is from, is almost as far from there in spirit as it is possible to get. Also, the opening chapter has the narrator, or rather Halfon himself, trying to explain the importance of literature to his students, and internal evidence was beginning to suggest an incautious fondness for Hemingway and jazz ...But I stuck with it because it had been pressed upon me by people whose opinion I value, and America is a lot closer to Guatemala than Vienna; and then I realised that I had become very intrigued by it indeed. Also, Halfon puts Hemingway aside and tries to get his students into Joyce – specifically, the story "A Little Cloud" – instead. (Someone should write about the importance of perseverance in reading. It is as if initial resistance actually enhances the ultimate value of the work. Also, this book lists five translators, so maybe the jackass-reliant one drifted away after the first chapter.)
So: Eduardo Halfon starts off teaching literature to a class of indifferent, obnoxious and smug students. Except for one, who, it turns out, is a very talented poet. Then one day he disappears, and Halfon travels into the middle of nowhere to find him. The poet is enigmatically quiet ("some smiles are not meant to be understood"), and the story ends in a kind of unstable equilibrium: the lessons of Joyce (circa Dubliners) and Hemingway would appear to have been learnt – at least by Halfon.
The book is, among other things, an examination into the reliability or otherwise of literature. Halfon's grandfather tells him that his Auschwitz number is his phone number, used that way so he doesn't forget it; he then relates the story of a Polish boxer in the camp who told him what to say in order to survive – and we later learn that this might have been a fabrication.
The Polish Boxer is a book that picks away at the idea of belonging as though at a scab; by which I mean to suggest that running all the way through it is a painful awareness of never quite fitting in, whether because of a state of mind, as in the case of Halfon's student, or because you are carrying within you the heritage of two antagonistic halves.
Halfon has a Jewish heritage, but he rejects his religion; and the main story, from around the third chapter onwards (I use the word "chapter" loosely), is about Milan Rakic, a half-Serbian, half-Gypsy concert pianist who is rejected by the Serbs because he is part Gypsy, and by the Gypsies because he is half-Serb.
A whole chapter is devoted to Rakic's postcards from around the world (this is very much a global book, travelling all over the place either in incident or background story), which all bespeak a great sense of isolation from his own family history: he is neither one thing nor the other. And in a similar way, the book itself exists in the no-man's-land between fiction and memoir. In the end, we decide, this is fable: only the stories are important, not their veracity or otherwise.
The book dives into Gypsy culture, while all the while acknowledging that it is for all practical purposes impenetrable to the outsider. Only love can find a way in: and then that's it for the lovers, as far as acceptance by their own cultures goes. There is a romance, suddenly introduced towards the book's end, which makes you realise that Rakic's story is going to be repeated with another couple: and it is to Halfon's great credit that he does not belabour, or even draw our attention to, the comparison.
Incidentally, one of the lessons of the book is that cigarettes are a really useful currency all over the world. There is so much smoking here, in fact, that I developed a persistent sympathetic cough while reading it.
