Resistance by Julian Fuks

cw: political violence, disappearing

Similarly to the last book I read, this is a novel that might not be a novel, but also deals with government sanctioned human rights abuses: this time the disappearances, torture, murders of political dissidents during the Peronist dictatorship in Argentina. A key focus, too, is on the fates of children born to people who were abducted by state actors while pregnant: tho many of these babies were murdered, too, some instead were adopted on the sly.

Resistance, though, isn’t about someone living through this torture or this displacement or this execution, it is instead the story of someone whose parents escaped Argentina (to Brazil, hence this book’s original publication in Portuguese (translation here by Daniel Hahn [add in later if you can be bothered to check]) before they were swept up in the violent repression, taking with them a child they adopted who may be one of the children born to a disappeared person before they were murdered and their body left in an unmarked grave.

So this, then, is one of those books that isn’t about, or isn’t centred on (at least?) the person, the people, its story tells. The central protagonist, the narrative voice (who seems to share a lot of biography with the author, tho nowhere on the cover is there an explicit statement that this is either memoir nor fiction… I say this but I didn’t actually look for one, so maybe there is? If anything, I suppose the book has less merit if it is a novel: a memoir, an essay, exploring the limits of personal reportage and when narrativising hits its limits is much less interesting a story when it’s made up… Or is it? Maybe it’s less impressive in its exhibition of empathy, if it’s a novel? Then again, maybe it’s impressive to make up a story where the most interesting people and perspectives and characters are not at its centre? I don’t know, do I? ‘Who am I to judge?’ as the Pope once said, one time.

(i’m mentally ill literary lifestyle blogger scott manley hadley 🤠🤠🤠)

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Resistance is very readable. But it’s under 200 pages and contains lots of short chapters, and maybe that’s all I mean by that? I dunno.

It is evocative, though, and it does present a complex and serious recent historical moment, and reckons with the legacy of torture, with generational trauma, with the often impossible (and always difficult) pursuit of closure and truth, and how this is especially difficult in relation to the people who were treated as if mere collateral by corrupt, violent, institutions.

It’s a sad book, about sad people living sadly, trying to (maybe succeeding?) convince themselves that they’re not sad and that the damage of the past is something that can be forgotten or forgiven, and how friction arises when one is confronted by people who are unwilling to move on, when one feels like maybe one shouldn’t. Does that make sense?

Is it about guilt created when running away from a righteous fight? Is it about guilt created when born a generation too late to join a righteous fight? Is it about the guilt that so many people need to, are forced to, fight, when many other people don’t need to?

I don’t know if it’s a novel or a memoir, but I do know that it’s a serious and engaging text that looks at horror and legacy and state repression and the consequences of political violence.

It is about feeling like one lacks a home, a root, an origin, it is about movement and change and promises and lies we are told and lies we tell ourselves.

I suppose I think, actually, it was very very good?

Maybe I did? I don’t know. I’m not much of a person to say either way…

🤠🤠🤠

Order direct from the publisher if that’s something you want to do