Winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger 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.
