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177 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2011
Milan Kundera says that Kafka’s inspiration was not totalitarian regimes—although this is the usual interpretation—but family life, the fear of being criticised by his fatherThese are the two themes explored in this book, a totalitarian regime—specifically Brazil in the sixties and seventies—and the relationship between a father and his daughter who has been disappeared. I say “been disappeared” because it’s not that she’s vanished or her own accord—she’s not run away from home or anything—she been disappeared by the State. It’s not quite as bad a what Orwell imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four with his “unpersons” because not every trace of her having existed has been effaced; it’s simply one day she’s there and then the next she’s not.
Even the Nazis, who’d reduced their victims to ashes, had registered the dead. Each one had had a number, tattooed on his or her arm. They’d noted each death in a book.What is happening around him is something very different. No one has taken responsibility for “the disappeared.” One day K.’s daughter is there, the next her and her Beetle, have vanished and neither is ever seen again. We learn this at the start of the book which does take the edge off a little because, as we watch the efforts made by K. in the days, weeks and months following his daughter’s disappearance to trace her and then, as the months turn to years, to simply learn what has happened to her, we know he never will.
I told him that that the damn dog hadn’t eaten anything since she arrived and he blamed me, saying I must have given the wrong food to the dear little doggie, even sent me off to buy expensive meat, more expensive than steak! He was even worse yesterday. When I said we had to get rid of her, he swore at me, said I was a brute, a coward, that anyone who hurts a dog is a coward. I almost said to him: and what about those who are fucking killing these poor students? Aren’t they much more of a brute than me?