Resistance
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
My brother is adopted, but I can’t say and don’t want to say that my brother is adopted. If I say this, if I speak these words that I have long taken care to silence, I reduce my brother to a single categorical condition, a single essential attribute...A young couple, involved in the struggle against the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina, must flee the country. The brutality and terror of the regime is closing in around them. Friends are being ‘disappeared’. Their names are on a list. Time is running out. When they leave, they take with them their infant son, adopted after years of trying for a child without success. They build a new life in Brazil and things change radically. The family grows as the couple have two more children: a son and a daughter.Resistance unfolds as an intimate portrayal of the formation of a family under extraordinary circumstances, told from the point of view of the youngest child. It’s an examination of identity, of family bonds, of the different forms that exile can take, of what it means to belong to a place, to a family, to your own past.Already winner of the Jabuti Award for Book of the Year 2016 (Brazil), the José Saramago Literary Prize 2017 (Portugal) and the Anna Seghers Prize 2018 (Germany), Resistance demonstrates remarkable courage and skill by one of Brazil’s rising literary stars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fuks's ruminative English-language debut follows a family living in Brazil after having fled the Argentinian dictatorship in the 1970s. The unnamed narrator, born after his parents adopted a son, relates how his brother struggled with his identity as an adopted child. There's also the struggle of his parents, forced to escape Argentina as members of the antigovernment resistance in the 1970s. The introspective narrative moves between blurred, disjointed family memories some true, some invented often leaving readers on shaky footing. Nevertheless, readers gradually piece together stories: the murder of the narrator's mother's colleague at the hospital due to "anti-government actions," the break-in and destruction of his father's office by government militia, and, finally, the family's escape to Brazil. Readers also slowly see a connection between the story of his brother's adopted identity struggle and that of his parents' displacement. Hundreds of babies of parents killed by Argentina's military dictatorship were given new families and identities, their true origins kept a secret. Could his brother be one of these children? Fuk's work, while challenging in form, comes together in a powerful way. This is a thoughtful novel about identity and exile.
