Tarantula

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.