Degraded by Time, Distorted by Perspective

By Marshall Shord

Read together, Resistance and Occupation—the first two novels in Julián Fuks’s “loose trilogy”—form a Janus-like portrait of a man in search of identity through a past that isn’t his and a future he will never know, while existing in a present he can never fully inhabit. The narrator of each novel is a writer named Sebastián, an authorial stand-in so lightly veiled Sebastián’s father at one point calls him Julián. In Resistance, we learn that Sebastián and his sister were born in Brazil, where Sebastián’s parents and adopted older brother (his family are not named) settled after fleeing from the Argentine military junta in the late seventies. Fuks takes Annie Ernaux’s assertion from The Years—that, “family narrative and social narrative are one and the same”—and adds to it a functional element: both family and society act as surfaces to reflect Sebastián back to himself.

Sebastián has a piercing sense of having missed out on something far richer than his own experience because he was born a few years too late and in the wrong country. His brother and parents share an intimacy he can never access. Sebastián fetishizes his brother for being adopted, for being purely Argentinian, not the hyphenated Brazilian-Argentinian Sebastián can only weakly claim. It’s as if, in Sebastián’s estimation, his brother’s having been born within the borders of Argentina affords him greater claim to the family’s legacy, a legacy that Sebastián prizes as the key by which he can define himself.

To Sebastián, the fracturing of the family line from the national line is the real tragedy of his family’s exile, which he undertakes to repair in his person. He does so by making frequent trips to Buenos Aires, where, among other things, he hangs around the periphery of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an organization still at work decades after the fall of the junta to discover the fates of their grandchildren born in its torture centers. Sebastián’s journeys result in a book wherein he, rather unnervingly, wanders the streets of Buenos Aires “looking at people’s faces,” seeking confirmation of his own “Argentinianness.” One can see that Sebastián is a man of unreal expectations and strange preoccupations. He has a mania for shaping the stuff of his reality (family history, memories, interpersonal relationships) to grant him distinction that is decidedly not his. As Elizabeth Hardwick says in her introduction to Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience: “A first-person narrator is never modest.”

Perhaps to distract him from such perpetual navel-gazing, Sebastián’s brother suggests he write about what it’s like being adopted. Resistance is Sebastián’s attempt. However, he emphatically fails at the novelist’s basic task of focusing on his protagonist with curiosity and empathy. “I wanted to talk about my brother . . . and yet I resist this proposal on every page, I flee whenever possible to the story of my parents,” he writes. Written another way, Resistance might have been a rather straightforward intergenerational novel, a Latin American Buddenbrooks. But that would draw the locus of the narrative away from Sebastián—and he can’t have that.

But it’s hard to blame Sebastián. His brother is as opaque as a wooden idol. Sullen and silent, refusing to eat, he is in protest of something no one in the family understands. Sebastián’s parents, on the other hand, have a rich history to draw upon, that “strange confluence that brought together a young Catholic girl of conservative origins and a Jew from a bohemian neighborhood who was a follower of Marxism.” Sebastián’s father is the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania. One of their ancestors “had been the father of botany.” Several family members were murdered in the Holocaust. Sebastián’s mother is from conservative Peruvian gentry on her mother’s side. Her father owned a large ranch in the Argentine pampas, where she was raised. They met while studying to become psychoanalysts at university in Buenos Aires.

The breadth of generations passes in a few pages. Facts flit by in Resistance; they are not things in themselves—self-contained, complete—but potential blocks in the edifice of Sebastián’s identity, tested for soundness by the barrage of rhetorical questions that seem to make up the bulk of the novel’s brief chapters. There is an anti-epistemological aspect to the self-work Sebastián is doing. The very nature of facts and events are slippery in his telling. What might be true on one page (say, an act of fraternal tenderness) is reversed a few pages later or denied altogether. But, like a compromising utterance from the witness stand, no amount of backtracking or striking from the record can erase what is said from the reader’s memory. It is clear almost from page one that any project Sebastián embarks on will end up being about himself.

For example, Sebastián invents a past for his brother in which he was one of the children stolen by the junta’s soldiers. Such a story folds neatly, and dramatically, into his parents’s experience, while etching upon his brother an ur-trauma to explain his present-day malaise. Without context, Sebastián’s narrative appears plausible; this is exactly the barbarous injustice the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are attempting to resolve. Except that Sebastián’s parents were enemies of the state, and the children of the disappeared were given over as reward to high-ranking members and supporters of the junta. Sebastián hangs on to his conjured narrative for as long as he can. He needs his family not only to be interesting but also to be players in part of a greater historical narrative because he feels left out of the flow of history. Only through borrowing the experiences of others can he give himself meaning.

Such borrowing as self-definition is recurrent throughout both novels. Take this other bit of family lore: during Sebastián’s father’s courtship of Sebastián’s mother, he was hiding guns for a militant group under his bed. Sebastián’s mother denies this ever happened, but his father insists it did. Sebastián sides with his father because it adds a level of gravitas to the family identity and, by transference, to him.

I think about those guns and I don’t understand the euphoria I feel, the vanity assailing me, as if the story of my father’s life were conferred upon me: I am the proud son of a leftist guerrilla fighter and this partly justifies me, this redeems my own inertia, this inserts me precariously into a lineage of non-conformists.

Sebastián uses that same word—“euphoria”—in Occupation when he learns that his father’s family were murdered at Auschwitz. “Yet all the same, it wasn’t sadness or pain I felt, but rather a kind of euphoria, as if this enriched my past, allied me to a great crowd of victims, positioned me in history.”

A novel in which Sebastián focuses solely on his adopted brother would likely push Sebastián to the periphery for much of the narrative. Existing only in relation to the subject, not as the subject itself, is, for Sebastián, to be erased from existence. Focusing on his parents, however, gives him room to elbow to the center of the narrative. In order to widen the narrative’s aperture, while ostensibly honoring the spirit of his brother’s request, Sebastián employs a bit of linguistic trickery that doesn’t fully survive in translation (which is wonderfully done by Daniel Hahn): “This is not just a story, not just his story. This is history.” In Portuguese, story and history are the same word: “história.” Therefore, his brother’s narrative (family) and greater events (social) are one and the same, and so can be discussed equally. There is no difference.

This conflation occurs again when Sebastián presents the book to his parents: “the whole time they were reading they felt a weird duplicity, they felt torn between readers and characters, oscillating endlessly between history and story.” Sebastián makes his first readers sick with the confusion between fact and almost-fact. His mother tells him, “I don’t know if those parents are us,” and adds, “You don’t lie the way writers usually lie, and yet a lie is constructed all the same.” Her mistake is in assuming she has read a family history, not a self-portrait. Sebastián’s father adds a damning bit of praise: “You never know, someone might even find a good novel to read in there.” He’s absolutely right. One just needs some distance from the family to find it.

Resistance ends before Sebastián presents the manuscript to his brother. In the moment Sebastián enters his brother’s room and regards him, Sebastián realizes he has failed. It is only now, he says, “that I open my eyes properly.” “I want to get to know my brother,” he goes on, “I want to see what I have never been able to see before.” If he is saying this now, then he is also saying that the one-hundred-and-fifty-odd pages that have preceded this moment contain no real insights about his brother. By not allowing his brother a chance to read and react to what he has written about him, Sebastián further reveals what the reader has known all along: the book was really never about his brother anyway, so who needs to hear his opinion about it?

Near the beginning of Occupation, Sebastián is contacted by a Syrian refugee named Najati, who has sought him out because, “They tell me you write about exile, about lives adrift, about trees whose roots are buried thousands of miles away.” In what feels like the plot of a detective novel, Najati gives Sebastián an address where he can find him, which turns out to be an abandoned hotel.

What follows is not at all like a detective novel. It is rather more like an oral history of societal collapse, à la Svetlana Alexievich. The hotel is a place of refuge for those washed up there by war, poverty, and natural disaster. Sebastián, drawn to each refugee by the particular distinction of their trauma—like a dog trained to sniff out cancer—begins to collect their stories, many of which are given ample space within the novel. The residents who encounter Sebastián don’t necessarily trust him, but over time they accept his presence.

Though natural enough on its face, Sebastián’s humanistic impulse to individuate suffering, to give each refugee their own narrative, threatens to corrupt the spirit of the collective. To preserve the movement, the occupation’s leader, Carmen, demands Sebastián change his perspective. “If you want to understand this place, best to forget about the personal journeys, the private lives. If you want to understand this place, best not to lose sight of the collective, best join us in the struggle.” The reader knows this isn’t likely.

Carmen’s words have a strange cadence to them. The parallel structure is rhetorical, lacking the feel of natural speech. It’s as if Sebastián, outside of their suffering, can’t render the words of the inhabitants in a way that doesn’t feel as if they were written by someone writing about refugees as characters—that is, as instruments furthering a larger narrative. The occupants stand out not as people but as constellations of misfortune. What defines them is what has befallen them. It is all external—earthquakes, state violence, global capitalism—and therefore totally meaningless. Such suffering, then, can be easily lifted from its bearer and repurposed. A Haitian refugee named Ginia sniffs out Sebastián’s intentions with ease: “You want me to lend you my distress, my pain?”

For Sebastián, the personal journey is the point; there is no collective he can thrive in greater than the nuclear family. Within the family unit, he is able to see himself reflected in each member. Within a collective, or within the greater world, Sebastián can only be subsumed, lost in all the people from all the different places, their stories not at all like his own. In such spaces, he will only ever be “an onlooker, an intruder, a mole.” Yet Sebastián continues to spend his time at the hotel. He even takes his own room there. Pointedly, it is on the top floor, symbolically replicating his social position in relation to the other residents, even though he would never say such a thing, nor would he likely even think it. His unconscious assumption of the space at the top speaks loud enough.

Sebastián’s habitation in the hotel is itself a form of refuge-seeking, “an excuse for me to take shelter from the ruined present.” After struggling to get pregnant for much of the novel and finally succeeding, his romantic partner Fê suffers a “complete spontaneous abortion.” Because he can’t fit himself into the narrative of Fê’s loss, because he will always have to stand outside it and accept her suffering on her own terms, Sebastián chooses to flee to the collective, where he can at least feel comfortable in his role as the outsider.

Resistance and Occupation have similar structures. Each has a collective that Sebastián uses to define himself against and an individual who stymies, frustrates, and ultimately surpasses his understanding. In Resistance, it is the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and his brother, respectively. In Occupation, it is the collective and Fê.

One senses jealousy in Sebastián’s voice as he describes Fê’s experience of pregnancy. He can be there with her while she visits the doctor; he can put his head to her stomach and listen to the life stirring inside of her. But he cannot share in the physical and emotional sensation of carrying a child. This makes Fê as unknowable to Sebastián, in his mind, as his brother. However, rather than rouse his curiosity, as it did with his brother, drawing him in, Sebastián flees from Fê’s opacity. Taking his stated intention at face value, Sebastián was compelled to write a book about his brother as a means of coming to know him better. With Fê, whom he has shared a decade of his life, he is compelled to want to write about other people’s tragedies.

Occupation culminates in the collective marching through the streets of downtown São Paulo to occupy another abandoned building. Sebastián joins them and is briefly swept up in fellow feeling. It passes as soon as the group reaches the building, and Sebastián, “stripped of the collective,” sees the fear on the faces of the occupiers: “that fear was something I could not be a part of, it was a fear I could not share.” The police will soon arrive, everyone knows, to use all the violence at their disposal to force them out. Sebastián is separate from this fear, assured there can be no consequences for his actions, save, maybe, a night in jail. Unlike the other occupiers, he is not driven by necessity; rather, he is taking a field trip from his grief. While he might think he is adding to the sum of the collective’s misfortunes, Sebastián is instead marking himself out—he alone has a home to return to. Finally, Sebastián admits what the reader has known all along: “I could not ally myself to the multitude of victims.”

The hotel in Occupation is an illusion of stability. Carmen tells Sebastián, “There’s already a repossession order for the Cambridge, stored away in the drawer of some suit-wearer or other.” The hotel’s inhabitants know better than anyone that what one calls one’s own can be taken away in a moment, without justification or recompense. A family, too, is an illusion of stability, shaped and preserved by mutually reinforcing stories. But the stories Sebastián tells himself about his childhood are disputed and prove unstable in his retelling them. There is no shared history, nothing held in common, that can’t be degraded by time or distorted by perspective.

There are forces greater than us at work upon each of our lives. Change is unpredictable and impersonal, and therefore terrifying. It’s no wonder that Sebastián’s mother, although a professed atheist (befitting her Marxist past), hides a saint behind a curtain in her apartment. And it’s no wonder that Sebastián seeks the stability of a coherent identity anchored in a shared family history. Otherwise, the next time the tide rises, he might get swept away; he might end up in a land where no one can his pronounce his name or understand his accent or know anything about who he was in his old life. Each refugee in the hotel is evidence enough of the nearness of such a fate.

Even the final occupation in Occupation serves the end of preserving a sentimental version of the past as a sort of talisman to ward off the predations of the now and the to-come: the building was once where Carmen and her daughter Preta lived. Preta tells Sebastián, “You can’t imagine how many memories I’ve got of this place.” But, she adds, with a perspective Sebastián lacks, “Those dreams never show the misfortunes.” The past has an appearance of permanence which is perversely reassuring when one is faced with a reality as senseless and unpredictable as a natural disaster. But to accept the past as an actual record of events—when it is at best a version—so as to live within its comforting stability is to lie to oneself. It will only be through living as “an inhabitant in a single present that is everything even if it lasts nothing” that Sebastián can ever learn who he really is outside of the warping contingencies of memory and hope.

Marshall Shord lives in Maryland. He is currently at work on a novel about the formation of the CIA.