Paperback of the week: Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon

The Guatemalan civil war was fought from 1960 to 1996, triggered by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company. The US conglomerate was the central American republic’s largest landowner and felt threatened throughout the 1950s by the country’s socialist turn. By the early 1980s, the war had entered a particularly brutal phase: kidnappings were rife and the government’s counter-insurgency campaign saw death squads murder thousands of political opponents.

This is the period when the family of Eduardo, the narrator of Tarantula, flees Guatemala for Florida. Three years later, as a young teen, he returns with his brother to spend the December break at a Jewish children’s camp. During their stay, Samuel, the charismatic camp leader (“one of the handsomest men I had ever seen,” Eduardo notes) subjects his charges to an immersive role play in which the counsellors are Nazis, and the children their Jewish victims. 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.

Eduardo Halfon writes slim, autofictional books that have collectively been referred to as a single ongoing novel (this instalment is brilliantly translated by Daniel Hahn). Their repeating themes include Guatemalan history, the Holocaust, questions of Jewish identity, and the nature of violence. The books recycle stories, such as Eduardo’s grandfather’s experience of Auschwitz and subsequent emigration to Guatemala; the family’s relocation to the States; and Eduardo’s own career as a writer. When a novel’s narrator and its author share a name and identity, it naturally prompts questions about what is true and what is invented. But 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.

There is a passage in Tarantula when Eduardo, having run into an old acquaintance in Paris, describes a morning from his childhood when he and his father saw a sign at the entrance to a Guatemala City golf club: “No dogs or Jews allowed.” But when Eduardo mentions it years later, his father denies ever having seen it. In a mirroring episode, Eduardo asks Samuel about the Nazi flag that was hoisted on the morning the role play began, only to be told “that wasn’t what happened, that I was inventing it or misremembering, that none of them there would ever have dared to raise a Nazi flag”.

“Is imagination so fanciful and audacious that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true?” Halfon wonders. It’s a seductive idea for a novelist, that what did or did not happen is not so important as the belief it did, and the way the story is told. It’s a dangerous one, too, particularly when applied to such dark passages of history as the Holocaust, or the disappearances in Halfon’s country. It must be significant, then, that Tarantula, which for so long dwells in darkness, should end with an act of simple kindness: a woman feeding a lost child.

Halfon is often compared to the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. While I can understand why (both write in Spanish, blend autobiography and invention, and are obsessed with the second world war and the violence of Latin American regimes), the deeper similarity is with the French Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. The Holocaust permeates the work of both men, who share a complicated relationship to their Jewishness. In his novel Monastery, Halfon describes himself as a “retired” Jew, while Modiano, whose work has been called “Jewish-ish”, has often noted the ambiguity of his relationship to that part of his identity. Lastly, in purely literary terms, both writers use clear, clean prose to construct paradoxically murky narratives: glass boxes filled with fog.

Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon, translated by Daniel Hahn, is published by Penguin (£10.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £9.89. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Ernie Janes / Alamy