resistance [julian fuks tr. daniel hahn]

Fuks’ novel is another of those tricksy texts that feel as though it’s autobiographical although it’s quite possibly not. The kind of text which makes one want to reach for Wikipedia to avoid the risk of saying something stupid. Which is to say that it would be easy to write here “Resistance is the story of the author’s struggle to come to terms with the cruelties of the Argentine dictatorship from which his parents fled before they settled in Brazil, where Fuks was born.” This is what the book feels like it’s about, but this might just be the skill of the writing which feels so convincingly first person that one can’t help but think this is a quasi autobiographical tale. Something which is reinforced by the closing chapter, where ‘the author’s’ parents comment on the factual inaccuracies in ‘the author’s’ version of events. Are these ‘parents’ really Fuks’ parents? Or are they just modelled on his parents? Or have they got nothing to do with them, or him, at all? We’re at the squeaky end of fiction, Rousseau’s Confessions, Proust’s memoirs, the sea wherein truth and fiction swim around each other like sharks. 

This matters principally because, in a tale about the consequences of dictatorship, authenticity feels important. Which might still be the point. Fuks’ elliptical novel details the narrator’s relationship with his adopted brother, who might or might not be the child of a woman who was ‘disappeared’ by the dictatorship. The narrator visits the headquarters of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers who have maintained a stoic, unflagging search; firstly to discover the fate of their missing children and then to re-locate their adopted grandchildren. Crimes that have reverberated through the generations. In Resistance, there’s a double irony in that the narrator’s parents, who adopt his brother, are left-wingers who have fled Argentina. The novel, again elliptically, explores with little specificity the way in which the narrator’s brother struggles to fit in, is always something of an outsider, no matter that he’s within a warm, loving family environment. The implication is that the adopted brother has somehow been saddled with the psychological burden of the Argentinian dictatorship’s crimes, whether he’s the child of political prisoners or not. In so doing, there are moments where the novel feels awkward: is Fuks suggesting that adoption as a rule tends towards this sense of psychological displacement? Or only in the event of the adopted child having been born into a state of emergency or crisis of which the child is unaware? 

The measured tone, reminiscent of the nouvel roman style of Chefjec or Toussaint, lends distance to the tale, which perambulates around Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo. Of itself the tone suggests that recovery from the crimes of history is feasible for the second generation, a measured sense of distance can be achieved; or at least it would do so if it were not for the nagging awkwardness of the narrative, which seems reluctant to ever pin down its subject matter, offering clues to the family conflict without ever showing the whole picture, like a jigsaw puzzle wherein some of the pieces can never be found.