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Letters from Latin America
Review of fiction by Brazilian Julian Fuks and poetry from Argentinean Susana Thenon and British Latinx Marina Sanchez
UNIQUE: Susana Thenon [Aymara Mont/cultura.gob.ar]

PART of a loose trilogy, Julian Fuks’s second novel Occupation (Charco Press, £9.99), follows his highly acclaimed 2015 book Resistance.

Skilfully translated by Daniel Hahn, his latest quasi-autobiographical work is a meditation on fatherhood, refugees and death. In it, the Brazilian author intertwines three separate accounts of refugees occupying a derelict building in downtown Sao Paulo, the story of the author’s psychoanalyst father dying from lung cancer and his wife’s pregnancy.

It takes some time for these narrative strands to complement each other and, when they do, the author creates a landscape that is as devastatingly personal as it is highly political, shedding light on contemporary life in Brazil under the right-wing administration of Jair Bolsonaro.

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