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

Audacious... Halfon's primary concern seems to be to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear... A short, dense puzzle of a book

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

Impressionistic, very well-realised... We get a real sense of why, for [some] people, the Holocaust did not instil a feeling of compassion for the wretched of the Earth and instead created a determination that such degradation would never again be visited upon Jewish people. But at what cost?

Resonant, dreamlike, disturbing... It's a breath of fresh air

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

One of the great global writers of his generation

Service95, 'The 21 Must-Read Books To Have On Your Radar In 2026'

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

Darkly unsettling but highly readable... [A] powerful autobiographical novel reflecting on the traumas of the Holocaust while raising the question of whether they are beyond the scope of fiction... Halfon moves with ease through past and present, refusing to traffic in suffering... A leading voice in Latin American fiction

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

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

'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.

Eduardo Halfon

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

Audacious... Halfon's primary concern seems to be to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear... A short, dense puzzle of a book

Incisive, troubling, provocative

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

Audacious... Halfon's primary concern seems to be to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear... A short, dense puzzle of a book

Incisive, troubling, provocative

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

Audacious... Halfon's primary concern seems to be to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear... A short, dense puzzle of a book

Incisive, troubling, provocative

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