Eduardo Halfon

Daniel Hahn

An extraordinary book. What begins as a shocking story reveals itself as a sidelong, mysterious meditation on trauma, vengeance and the terrible capacity of the past to shape the present

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

Chilling. A story set in the Guatemalan jungle that resonates in Gaza, in Donbas, anywhere victims end up resembling their own executioners

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

This taut, magisterial novel explores the possibility of disentangling one's trauma and one's roots

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

'We woke up to screaming. In the doorway stood the silhouette of Samuel Blum, our friend and unconditional protector, now uniformed in black and carrying a club. Crawling down his left arm, I slowly noticed, was a huge tarantula.' 
 
In 1984, twelve-year-old Eduardo is sent to the mountains for what his parents describe as Jewish summer camp. What it turns out to be is an immersive re-enactment of a Nazi concentration camp. 
 
Decades later, on the other side of the world, Eduardo sits across a table from a stranger. This is Samuel Blum, the Jewish camp counsellor who transformed into a terrifying Nazi commandant all those years ago. Now he is an old man, and he is ready to talk. 
 
Tarantula 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 living in the long aftermath of the twentieth century, and how the past lives on the present.

Tarantula

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Praise for Tarantula

An extraordinary book. What begins as a shocking story reveals itself as a sidelong, mysterious meditation on trauma, vengeance and the terrible capacity of the past to shape the present

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

Chilling. A story set in the Guatemalan jungle that resonates in Gaza, in Donbas, anywhere victims end up resembling their own executioners

An extraordinary book. What begins as a shocking story reveals itself as a sidelong, mysterious meditation on trauma, vengeance and the terrible capacity of the past to shape the present

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

Chilling. A story set in the Guatemalan jungle that resonates in Gaza, in Donbas, anywhere victims end up resembling their own executioners

An extraordinary book. What begins as a shocking story reveals itself as a sidelong, mysterious meditation on trauma, vengeance and the terrible capacity of the past to shape the present

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

Chilling. A story set in the Guatemalan jungle that resonates in Gaza, in Donbas, anywhere victims end up resembling their own executioners

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