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.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
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) *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Produkt-Hinweis
Maße
Höhe: 198 mm
Breite: 129 mm
Dicke: 15 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-4059-8676-2 (9781405986762)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Eduardo Halfon is one of the great global writers of his generation. He is the author of fifteen novels examining questions of identity, memory and history as a Jewish man, as a Guatemalan, as a descendant of European and Middle Eastern refugees, including The Polish Boxer, Mourning and Cancion . He has received international literary awards including the Prix Medicis Etranger, the Prix Roger Caillois and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France, the Premio de la Critica and the Premio Jose Maria de Pereda in Spain, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and the International Latino Book Award in the US, and the National Prize in Literature of Guatemala, his country's highest literary honour. Eduardo Halfon was named one of the thirty-nine most promising young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival in Bogota and is a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. Tarantula is his latest novel.
