In the early 1980s, an adolescent Eduardo Halfon, then living in Florida with his parents after fleeing the violence of the Guatemalan Civil War, returned to his home country to attend a camp for Jewish children. For the first few days, the experience was typical enough — expeditions into the forest, lessons in survival techniques, nights fitfully sleeping on a cot. Then, early one morning, Halfon and his companions were awoken by uniformed camp counselors with swastikas affixed to their arms. Hours of physical and emotional abuse ensued. The organizers had decided, for supposedly educational purposes, to force the children to survive a brutal reenactment of a Nazi concentration camp.
A fictionalized telling of this experience forms the center of Tarantula, Halfon’s latest book to be translated into English. It’s a novel that inevitably draws much of its power from an irresistibly unsettling premise. In that sordid camp, we see the legacy of historical violence, the psychological strain of confused identity, the blurred lines between victim and perpetrator, and the impossibility of preventing a supposed simulacrum from becoming a painful reality — all themes that resonate in our tech-infused, conflict-ridden era. Amid the sadistic counselors, the cowering children, and the blurry-eyed Eduardo, who at first mistakes a swastika for the titular tarantula, we realize we’re watching the Stanford prison experiment wrangled into a new historical context. It’s the sort of situation that is inherently literary, because it draws out the complexities and absurdities of society and life.
But Tarantula is much more than a fascinating situation brought to life. In Halfon we have a writer who should be much better known than he is. At the risk of sounding trite (because surely it’s a bit trite to compare a Spanish-language writer to the century’s most renowned Spanish-language writer), Eduardo Halfon is in many ways an heir to Roberto Bolaño. Yes, their subject matter often overlaps — oblique encounters with the world-historical, an obsession with literature-as-subject, a thirst for adventure and dark corners and vast landscapes and sex — but it’s the concurrence of their styles that’s most notable. Both Halfon and Bolaño sound less like writers artfully constructing words into sentences and more like friendly rogues telling stories at a bar. There’s a naturalness to the prose, a seemingly unconscious understatedness, a simplicity that — unlike, say, a Raymond Carver story that’s been clipped into near-oblivion by Gordon Lish — mimics the matter-of-fact but illuminating manner in which intelligent people often speak. The very first sentence of Tarantula, for example, goes, “We woke up to screaming.” In many ways, this is the prototypical “grab the reader’s attention” opening line, but not overbearingly or obnoxiously so. What saves it? The fact that it’s also so natural. It’s exactly what you might expect the narrator to say if asked, “So, tell me what happened?” A lesser writer would ham it up, overdecorating that first line with needless adjectives, contorting it into a syntactical mess. Halfon knows better. What happened, Eduardo? A deep breath. A sip of beer. A sigh. “We woke up to screaming.”
Interspersed with the story of the camp, Tarantula presents us with snippets in the life of the adult Eduardo Halfon as he attends a fellowship in Berlin and, ultimately, meets with a former camp counselor who tormented him decades before. With these sections, as well as a few brief descriptions of Eduardo’s early childhood in Guatemala City, Halfon places himself squarely within the autofiction tradition. In and of itself, this fact isn’t particularly interesting. Writer takes part in dominant literary trend. Big whoop. What makes Halfon’s work — Tarantula as well as earlier novels like Monastery and The Polish Boxer — so noteworthy is the blending of that Knausgårdian casualness with the bluntness of violent encounters and the experience of historical trauma. We accompany Eduardo as he waits for a delayed flight, as he photographs toy soldiers in a sandbox, and as he wonders what’s causing the elevator to smell. As in all good autofiction, the verisimilitude of these incidents, and maybe even their banality, makes them feel so real, and therefore so captivating. But unlike much autofiction, these happenings — these descriptions of “normal,” comfortable life — are liable to be brutally interrupted by the shouts of swastika-adorned counselors or the spray of machine gunfire. In one scene, young Eduardo, still living in Guatemala City, is standing at first base while his brother plays right field and their father watches from the bleachers. Their father shouts and cheers. A military helicopter appears low in the sky, a soldier visible inside. The soldier begins shooting at “some person (or some people)” in a nearby neighborhood. The batter hits a ground ball to third, and, amid the sound of the firing, the game continues. In Halfon’s work, horrors don’t come wrapped in dramatic soundtracks and special effects. They arrive as they do in real life — as happenings, simple and real.
In writing so plainly of both the quotidian and the world-historical, the mildly annoying and the unspeakably violent, Halfon shows us how we all might more truthfully represent our current age. His is, perhaps, just the type of writing we need as the comforts of the early 21st century give way to rising authoritarianism, great power conflict, environmental degradation, and the frightening prospect of technology-induced social decimation. People are being whisked away by masked agents of the state. Antiliberal forces are suggesting that racism is good, actually, and that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. And yet, for most people, these terrors arise alongside the general normality of everyday life. Hit people with a Handmaid’s Tale-style dystopia or a Blood Meridian-esque description of carnal violence, and many readers in their coffee shops and breakfast nooks can’t help but roll their eyes. But give them something like what Halfon’s crafted here, in which political violence, power hunger, and the very worst of human nature arise amid that bourgeois, comfortable world, and all of a sudden the realness of the threat becomes clear. And when threats feel real, people can’t help but pay attention.
Nothing about Tarantula suggests Halfon wrote it primarily to serve a political purpose. That’s what allows him to follow that lodestar of recent American literature — identity — in a way that’s truly insightful and compelling. If readers have tired of identity’s literary prominence, it’s not because there’s anything wrong with it as a theme. The problem, then, is that too many writers seem to start from the simplistic politics of identity and work backwards from there. I’m thinking here of books like Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys,which I picked up with enthusiasm and finished with disappointment, and which reads as if an AI system had been prompted to consume the “Twentieth-Century Racism” section of a middle-school textbook and use it to produce a novel. Halfon, in contrast, starts from the experience of identity and works forward. As a result, we get scenes, simply told, that contain the complexity, ambiguity, and fraughtness of identity without deigning to encapsulate anything.
Take, for example, a moment when young Eduardo is watching sitcoms with his parents in Florida and laughs as an old Jewish carpenter on-screen is made the butt of a joke, which sets his mother weeping and causes his father to “explode.” Later, we see adult Eduardo remembering — while sharing a table in a Paris cafe with a woman who was once his campmate — how his father’s country club in Guatemala had posted a sign out front that read: “No Dogs or Jews allowed.” Eduardo-as-narrator concedes that he finds it hard to believe such a sign really existed, that his father insisted they never saw it, and that he may have “retained the image of the sign created in [his] imagination.” This moment captures much of what’s brilliant about Tarantula — cartoonish violence and horrific discrimination are real, and questions of identity are ever-present and often painful, yet they’re also subjected to the failings of memory and caught up in impossible contradictions (Halfon writes that such a sign seemed “impossible” in the ’70s, and yet, just a few years later, Guatemala’s armed forces perpetrated an identity-based genocide against its rural Maya population).
Much as Tarantula’s premise is inherently interesting, Eduardo Halfon is an inherently interesting man. A Jewish Guatemalan American with Polish and Arab roots, Halfon was living in Berlin when he penned Tarantula, and every aspect of this biography appears in the book. Perhaps most interesting of all, this personal history intertwines with the linguistic history of the novel. In a recent interview, Halfon described how, when writing, the words first come to him in English, and he then translates them into Spanish in his head before putting them on the page. So as we read this English version of Tarantula, adeptly translated by Daniel Hahn, we’re encountering a text that’s been translated back into its original language.
Still I would not prefer Halfon’s original English version to Hahn’s translation. For a person and a writer as complicated as Eduardo Halfon, whose life and literary career have sent him ping-ponging across continents, decades, and cultures, it seems perfectly fitting that each word should go on its own literary journey, before taking a final spin in the mind of the thoughtful reader.
Benjamin Clabault is a writer from Massachusetts. He lives with his wife and two sons in Lake Placid, FL, where he is completing a novel manuscript about an American “seeker” gone missing in Guatemala. You can find his writing on Substack.