Bernardo Kucinski's strange fruit

Abstract

Narrating the trauma that results from State violence is no simple task. Additional difficulties are certain to be found within societies in which the day of reckoning has not come for perpetrators. This is the challenge Bernardo Kucinski faces when writing K., a novel that draws heavily on the author’s biography to investigate the violations of human rights by Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship. Making use of theoretical tools both from autofiction and testimony literature, this article aims at an interpretation of K.’s form. By assembling not only different voices but a variety of genres of discourse, the author creates a narrative that places itself in between fiction and reality and resists qualification within specific reading frameworks. The hypothesis here formulated is that Kucinski makes this aesthetic choice as a way of addressing the open wounds the Brazilian State has been failing to regarding its crimes of the past.