Description

Winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger in France and the Premio de la Critica in Spain

Conversation-starting and prize-winning international fiction: an extraordinary meditation on violence, conspiracy and the many complex afterlives of the Holocaust

Eduardo and his brother have been living in the US for three years when their parents send them back to Guatemala for the holidays. It is 1984 and their native country, in the midst of a violent civil war, feels newly alien to them – their Spanish faltering, already half-forgotten. Their grandfather collects the boys from the airport and drives them into the mountains, depositing them at what they’re told is a Jewish summer camp.

At the camp, the children meet a counsellor called Samuel Blum: a handsome young man with sky-blue eyes who knows about all kinds of things. He shows them how to make a survival shelter out of branches and leaves, and how to kindle a fire using a glass bottle. He sings songs with them and plays games. But he also trains them to march in rank, and salute, and dive for cover. He teaches them the Hebrew words for ‘grenade’ and ‘soldier’ and ‘silence’.

On the fourth day, everything changes. The boys are shaken from their beds at dawn. A terrifying figure, uniformed in black, looms over them, and beyond him is the sound of screaming outside. Eduardo looks into the stranger’s face – it is Samuel Blum, but his sky-blue eyes look different now. In his hand he carries a club. Crawling down his left arm is a huge tarantula.

Thought-provoking and powerfully ambivalent, Tarantula is an extraordinary meditation on the many complex afterlives of the Holocaust. It is a novel about individual and collective inheritance, individual and collective violence; about memory, trauma, connection and estrangement. It asks what it means to be a Jew in the long wake of the twentieth century, and how the past lives on in the present.

Publisher Review

This novel about a violent and traumatic childhood episode is eerily current - the questions it raises about identity, resistance and history are both deeply personal and universal -- Mariana Enriquez Among [Halfon's] preoccupations are the legacy of violence and mass murder in Europe and Latin America; the frequency and facility with which the past intrudes upon the present; the quixotic effort to separate family myth from historical fact; and the ways in which pleasure consoles us * New York Review of Books (USA) * This taut, magisterial novel explores the possibility of disentangling one's trauma and one's roots * Le Monde des Livres (France) * Virtuoso... [An] exploration of memory, of the power of imagination, of Jewish and Guatemalan identity, and of the transmission of a family or collective history * Florilettres (France) *