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the complete review - fiction

Tarantula

by
Eduardo Halfon

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : well-done, discomfiting work

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "During their stay, Samuel, the charismatic camp leader (...) subjects his charges to an immersive role play (...). This experience is the knot Eduardo attempts to unpick, both at the time of its unfolding and years later as a writer on a fellowship in Berlin, in this short, dense puzzle of a book. (...) Halfon’s primary concern seems not to be with establishing facts, as a memoirist might, but to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear." - Chris Power, The Observer
  
  
• "Aunque la evocación minuciosa de la experiencia traumática sea el tuétano perturbador del relato, este obtiene su fuerza del contraste entre el presente del escritor consolidado y el siniestro acontecimiento que emerge súbitamente del túnel del tiempo a causa del reencuentro con la enigmática Regina (una de las niñas del campamento) y el oscuro instructor Samuel Blum. (...) Me abstengo de describir el programa diseñado para lograr semejante fin; solo diré que su narración, amarrada con suma destreza a la subjetividad infantil, atrapa y sobrecoge gracias a una certera orquestación de todos sus recursos formales." - Domingo Rodenas de Moya, El País
  
  
• "Multiple layers of distancing are at work, amplified by the question of whether this is all invention or a personal unburdening. Halfon's style is bony and bare, stripped of metaphor, which gives an incisive quality to the writing, here in translation by Daniel Hahn. Whether this is a novel or memoir or metafictional game, it throws up questions that are challenging and provocative, even if we can't quite feel the pain." - Damon Galgut, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Tarantula is an autobiographical work -- novel, autofiction, memoir, or some mix thereof --, with narrator Halfon moving back and forth between the present, when Halfon is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the past, focusing mainly on his experiences in 1984, at a camp in Guatemala that his parents sent him and his brother to when he was thirteen. (Halfon's family had: "fled the political and social chaos that was Guatemala in the 1980s", and had been living in the United States for the previous three years.)
       With an opening sentence: "We woke up to screaming" it is not all that surprising that Tarantula is, in part, a horror story of sorts. The camp is apparently meant to provide the experience of: "learning not only wilderness survival skills but also wilderness survival skills for Jewish children" (which, as his parents explained: "are not the same thing"). Camp counselor Samuel Blum -- blond, blue-eyed, and: "one of the handsomest men I had ever seen" -- certainly believed in the importance of the latter, with the whole camp clearly, awfully geared to giving the poor kids an all-too graphic and visceral taste, and putting them through the paces, of what those running the show believed all Jews are up against. In the present, then, Halfon again meets an unrepentant Blum .....
       Halfon notes that: "the whole camp seemed military", with uniforms, schedules (Halfon stands guard duty in the deepest hours of night), and hierarchies. The group he is assigned to is called 'Palmaj' -- "the name of the unit of elite Jewish soldiers in the unofficial army, called Haganah, during the British Mandate for Palestine, in the forties, before the creation of the state of Israel" (whose original members included Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan). As to the activities at camp:

     All were activities of indoctrination, of course. Though I never called them that, nor could my preadolescent analysis have been so sophisticated. But something in my still naïve mind did begin to grasp that the games and the songs and the meals and the chats and even the walks through the woods had the same purpose: to inculcate in us not a religious Judaism, nor an Orthodox Judaism, nor a Reform Judaism, nor even a secular Judaism, which I might have expected; rather, the camps whole program was designed to instill in us the feeling of being a Jew among Jews. Members of a private club. Or inhabitants of a single community. Or obedient, well brought up citizens of a state, in this case a Zionist state amid the diaspora of the Guatemalan highlands.

I refused to speak to them in Spanish; they would speak to me in Spanish and I would answer in English. But my biggest rejection, and by far the most scandalous, was of Judaism.

Had the sign only ever existed in my mind ? Is imagination so fanciful and audacious that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true ? Anyway, doesn't much matter. The sign existed. I saw it or I imagined it, which for a kid is the same thing.

- M.A.Orthofer, 24 February 2026

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Links:

• Bellevue Literary Press publicity page
• Penguin publicity page
• Libros del Asteroide publicity page
• Table Ronde publicity page
• Le Livre de Poche publicity page
• Koppernik publicity page
• Excerpt
• Excerpt

• Desde la ciudad sin cines (Spanish)
• En attendant Nadeau (French)
• Gustavo Godoy (Spanish)
• hoyesarte.com (Spanish)
• Janu Huerta (Spanish)
• Les Lectures de Cannetille (French)
• Lecturissime (French)
• MaremotoM (Spanish)
• La Nación (Spanish)
• Le nouveau blog littéraire de Pierre Ahnne (French)
• The Observer
• Otra Parte (Spanish)
• Página|12 (Spanish)
• El Periódico (Spanish)
• El Placer de la Lectura (Spanish)
• Plaza Pública (Spanish)
• Publishers Weekly
• RevDem
• Transfuge (French)
• Tzum (Dutch)
• Un libro al día (Spanish)
• La viduité (French)
• Zenda (Spanish)

• Guggenheim Fellow information page

• The Polish Boxer

• See Index of Latin and South American literature

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About the Author:

       Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon was born in 1971.

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© 2026 the complete review

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