Past Not Forgotten

Resistance is a different reading experience—a quasi-fiction, and largely autobiographical. Narrator is searching, creating, eluding, hunting the pasts of his family, and trying to understand or give a meaning to his relationship with the adoptive brother. Narrator has managed to create duplicity and duality of reality. Sebastián, the storyteller, has used fragments of images from the household talking and his own experience of growing up, to create a past, which sometimes seems ambiguous, imbued with conflict of the versions of truth, memory that can and cannot be trusted.

Dictatorships can come

back, I know, and I also know that the arbitrariness, the

oppressions, the suffering, exist in all kinds of ways, in all

kinds of regimes, even when hordes of citizens march

biennially to the ballot box

                                                    

The pure literary expressions and impressions have connected the characters, often trying to portray their inner beings, posed in front of universal themes of love and relation. There is not a sequence of events to follow in the story. Memories draw the past, and again the past projects memories. The story is about a family—victim of political exile—who moves from Argentina to Brazil with an adopted son, and later has have two other children in Brazil. The story is told by the youngest of the children, who digs into the family history and secrets, and problems of adoption. He visits the land from where his parents had fled, and feels that he's inherited the sense of exile.

I know that I am writing my failure. I don’t really know

what I’m writing. I waver between an incomprehensible

attachment to reality – or to the paltry spoils of the world

we usually call reality – and an inexorable pull towards

telling tales, an alternative gimmick, a desire to forge

the meanings life refuses to give us.

                                        

The sentences are packed with meanings and it asks readers to stay with the text—often short and lyrical, and meant to be absorbed and felt than understood. Story tends to capture the forgotten time, and shifts between the strata of exile and family tension. Discovering and accepting the new identities is also a theme of the novel—Identities, which couldn't become sharp, and wavering in family affairs. The author has said in an interview that history is always filled with stories of resistance, and his interest in the modes of resistance is clearly an echo heard here all over. Narrator tries to understand the past, identifying himself in the being of his brother and parents, and discovers his own hidden characters. The episodes reconstructed from the memories of the past outlines narrator's struggle to get attached and loved by his brother. He's also troubled by his own instinct, on why is he so interested in the past, especially about his parent's political involvement and their retreat. It may also seem he is juggling with the memory, sometimes projecting it pitch-perfect and at other times rendering it like a suspension of clouds—the spaces we create around ourselves, may or may not be the outcome of our choices.

Hard to appreciate the full weight an insignificant

thing can assume when various interpretations are

projected onto it, when so many meanings crystallise

within it. To move from the most banal circumstances to

a feeling of tragedy, sometimes all it takes is a subtle slip,

a minor error.

It is hard for narrator's brother to accept his weight, his being and his identity. His reclusiveness has sparked the narrator to visit buried memories, and see himself in those mirrors of the time. Themes of silence, terror of the past and struggle with selves are fixated in the story. This is not a plot driven story. It feels like essayistic narration, psychological drama and definition of impressions as well. At times, the self-declaration of the narrator, defining the character of the story he is telling, removes us from all the confusion we may get trying to make the meaning of the text. Metafictional use of narration has served the purpose well: "Quite without subtlety, I find myself afraid: maybe this book is the error, created for a non-existent addressee." Resistance is a pure literary charm.

Author: Julián Fuks

Translator: Daniel Hahn

Publisher: Charco Press

Page Count: 150

Price: $14.46