Resistance

by Julián Fuks, Daniel Hahn (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781999859329
Publisher:	Charco Press
Publication date:	11/05/2019
Pages:	150
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

Julián Fuks was born in São Paulo in 1981 and is the son of Argentinian parents. As an author whose work has garnered several top international literary prizes, Fuks has gained recognition as one of Brazil’s most outstanding young writers. He has worked as a reporter for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo and as a reviewer for the magazine Cult . Fuks is the author of Histórias de literatura e cegueira (2007) and Procura do romance (2011), both shortlisted for the Oceanos Award as well as for the Jabuti Award. During 2017, Julián Fuks worked alongside Mia Couto as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Considered by Fuks to be his most important work to date, Resistance was the winner of the Jabuti Award for Book of the Year (2016), the Oceanos Prize (2016), the José Saramago Literary Prize (2017) and the Anna Seghers Prize (2018). He currently lives in São Paulo.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with over one hundred books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include fiction from Europe, Africa and the Americas and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. Recent books include the new Oxford Companion to Children's Literature and translations of Julián Fuks’ Resistance and Occupation . He is a former chair of the Society of Authors and is presently on the board of a number of organisations that deal with literature, literacy, translation and free expression. In 2021 Daniel was made an OBE for his services to literature.

Read an Excerpt

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: my brother is something, and this something is what so many people try to see in him, this something is the set of marks we insist on looking for, despite ourselves, in his features, in his gestures, in his acts. My brother is adopted, but I don’t want to reinforce the stigma that the word evokes, the stigma that is the word itself made character. I don’t want to deepen his scar, and if I don’t want to do this, I must not say scar.I could use the verb in the past tense and say my brother was adopted, thereby freeing him from that eternal present, from perpetuity, but I can’t get over the strangeness of this formulation. My brother wasn’t some different thing until he was adopted; my brother became my brother the moment he was adopted, or rather, the moment I was born, some years later. If I say my brother was adopted, it’s as though I were reporting quite calmly that I’d lost him, that he was kidnapped, that I had a brother until somebody came and took him far away.The remaining option is the most sayable; of all the possibilities, it’s the one that causes the least disquiet, or that best disguises it. My brother is an adoptive son.There’s something technical about the term, adoptive son, which contributes to its social acceptability.There’s a novelty to it that absolves him, just for an instant, of the blemishes of the past, that seems to cleanse him of any undesirable meanings. I say my brother is an adoptive son and people nod solemnly, masking any sorrow, lowering their eyes as though they weren’t eager to ask anything more. Perhaps they share my uneasiness, or perhaps they really do forget the whole business with the next sip or the next forkful. If the uneasiness continues to reverberate within me, it’s because I also hear this phrase partially – my brother is a son – and it’s hard to accept that it won’t end up leading to the usual tautological truth: my brother is the son of my parents. I chant over and over that my brother is a son and the question always springs to my lips: whose son?

Editorial Reviews

…Fuks's skill lies in his quiet exploration of how exclusion—willed or imposed—shapes experience within families. Like much autofiction, this slim novel, skillfully translated by Hahn, is preoccupied with the act of narration: how, even whether, to write about those we know…The "resistance" of the novel's title…is not just literal, but also figurative—the resistance of truth, nostalgia, silence and, ultimately, narratives.

The New York Times Book Review - Sheila Glaser

11/04/2019

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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

International Dublin Literature Prize (Longlist)
English PEN (Award)
José Saramago Literary Prize (Winner)
Jabuti Award for Best Foreign Edition (Winner)
Oceanos Prize for Literature in Portuguese (Winner)
Jabuti Award for Book of the Year (Winner)
Anna Seghers Prize (Winner)

"Fuks’s skill lies in his quiet exploration of how exclusion — willed or imposed — shapes experience within families." —New York Times

"This small book carries a big punch...Fuks is a young writer to watch." —The Guardian

"Fuks’ prose is rythmic and patterned." —The Times Literary Supplement

"Eloquent, unsettling and deeply philosophical." —The Financial Times

"Fuk’s work, while challenging in form, comes together in a powerful way. This is a thoughtful novel about identity and exile." —Publishers Weekly

"This elegant, essayistic novel, the first translated into English by this Brazilian writer, is a family drama with the dramatic parts deliberately quieted.... Fuks impressively inhabits the near despair that comes with the fragmentation of family and country." —Kirkus

"Resistance is an urgent and profound novel, a meditation on family, home and dislocation. Fuks focuses on a single family living in Brazil, years after fleeing Argentina. One of the best novels I've read concerning the generation after Brazil's military regime. Fuks' writing is sharp and humane, intimate and lyrical. A stunning work." —Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore

"A brilliant achievement." —Le Monde

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Praise for Julián Fuks
Part of The New York Times' The Decameron Project: New Fiction.

"Fiction to look out for in 2021." —The Observer

"...a thoughtful, intimate exploration of how people literally and figuratively occupy their own stories and those of others." —Publishers Weekly

"Poignant, thought-provoking and engaging." —The Scotsman

"Wholly mesmerising." —Irish Times

"Best books of 2021" —The Financial Times

"This is one beautiful book." —Mia Couto

"A slender yet striking novel." —Hopscotch Translation

"Occupation asks a lot of its readers, but it gives in equal measure; and when you do come up for air, you look around you with a renewed and invigorated sense of the space you occupy in your own life. Superb." —Lunate

"A quiet masterpiece." —Asymptote

"In Fuks’ prose occupation and resistance walk hand-in-hand." —Full Stop

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From the Publisher

2019-08-19
A somber contemplation of brotherhood in the context of Argentina's Dirty War of the 1970s.

This elegant, essayistic novel, the first translated into English by this Brazilian writer, is a family drama with the dramatic parts deliberately quieted. The narrator's parents were involved in the resistance to Argentina's junta, forced to leave the country months after adopting a baby boy, eventually resettling in São Paulo. But though the narrator recalls his father's office being ransacked and his perpetual fear of "the crash of shoulders against the door...rough arms turning his things upside-down," the book is less concerned with the emotions of displacement and the horrors of political violence that with the impact their exile had on the family. The narrator keeps returning to the question of where his adopted brother came from, with escalating concern that the brother's story intersects with those of the families of the disappeared under the dictatorship. The narrator skips around his family's chronology and moves gingerly around the questions that gnaw at him, which gives the novel's title a dual meaning, at least; it's a story about the impact of pushing against political power but also about the silence within families. "I can't decide if this is a story," he laments at one point; "I don't really know who I'm writing to," he says elsewhere. That uncertainty is a risky move for a novelist, and the recursive, self-questioning nature of the narrative can feel static, a feeling that's girded by the adopted brother's being described as quiet and painfully isolated. But it's not hard to appreciate how Fuks is trying to capture the sense of loss that comes with a life that's delivered "an infinity of small hurts."

Though the novel operates at a curiously low boil considering the turmoil at its center, Fuks impressively inhabits the near despair that comes with the fragmentation of family and country.

Kirkus Reviews