Julian Fuks is a Brazilian-Argentine author who, according to Wikipedia, has been writing since 2004 and according to Goodreads has authored numerous books. Resistance, originally published in 2015, is his first novel to be translated into english by the very excellent Charco Press. Having won awards in 2016 and 2017, the novel was recently longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize (which is why I’m reading it).

Resistance is autofiction,* a literary term describing autobiographical novels where some events have been tweaked, amended, even fabricated. Of course, I have no idea what sections are made-up – other than Fuks changing his name from Julian to Sebastian – but the book has all the interiority and intimacy of a memoir. The opening line of the novel – “My brother is adopted, but I can’t say and don’t want to say that my brother is adopted” – suggests that Fuks will examine the sibling relationship; and to an extent he does, but not in the way I expected. It all revolves around the word adopted, and what that means in the context of Argentina in the 1970s during the “Dirty War” where the military dictatorship of the country disappeared 30,000 people. There were many babies who suddenly lost one or both of their parents, the children handed to those the Government favoured. Fuks’ parents were very lucky to adopt a child given they were associated with anti-Government groups. When a friend of Fuks mother is marched away never to be seen again, his parents decide to leave the country for Brazil. 

Resistance is a short book, most of the chapters less than two pages long. This is suggestive of a narrator struggling with his subject matter. Not that I have to guess, Sebastian tells us a couple of times that he’s failing to write the book. This frustration stems from an unconscious or deliberate inability to focus on his brother, to flesh out his character. The depiction we get (late in the narrative) is a person with clear mental health issues who locks himself in his room and refuses to eat or engage with his family. And yet the brother’s presence is always felt, especially the fact he was adopted and whether his parents feel a measure of guilt that they were incidentally complicit in the Government’s crimes. This is powerfully expressed in a handful of chapters devoted to the grandmothers of the missing who during and after the “Dirty War” campaigned for the whereabouts and return of their grandchildren. 

Resistance is an emotionally layered and complex novel where the burden of history lays heavily on the author.

* If we’re being pedantic, Resistance isn’t autofiction because Julian Fuks isn’t the first person protagonist, it’s a character named Sebastian. I know, I know, how dare Julian Fuks break such sacred rules.