Before me is a thin volume, and its title is a precursor of the brevity to come. Yet despite this, K isn’t a short story, a novella, or a collection of fragments stuffed together in aspiration to one of these forms. It is a selection of glimpses into thoughts and states of mind, each fading in and out, like dimming pulses.
This is a structural quirk that emulates the disappearance of the Brazilian protagonist’s unnamed daughter and the desolating effect it has on her father. His hopelessness is limitless, the situation has no distinct end in sight, information given sparks up hope and then fades into the background amongst all the other lies.
This book is the work of Bernardo Kucinski, journalist, lecturer and one-time Lula-advisor, whose own sister was among the Brazilian “disappeared” of the 1970s. He begins K almost innocently, or deceptively, with the protagonist’s irritation at receiving post for someone who no longer lives at his address, and hasn’t for some time. The domesticity is touching, but it becomes dark when we realise it is a means to introduce the concept of ‘the disappeared’.
