Occupation by Julian Fuks

Review by Hannah Clark

Occupation is not for the faint-hearted. Written in sparse prose that fans of award-winning author Julian Fuks will recognise, Occupation is a sequel of sorts to his acclaimed 2015 novel Resistance.

Fuks returns to his alter ego Sebastian and in alternating chapters the novel explores his relationship with his ailing father, his conversations with refugees in a building in downtown Sao Paulo, and his attempts to start a family with his wife.

Translated (as with Resistance) by Daniel Hahn into English, the language of Occupation is rich and elegant, allowing Sebastian’s quiet reminiscences to swerve the pitfalls of ordinary memoir. By turn philosophical and poetic, the often shocking scenes that so calmly unfold throughout the novel are expressed with an unflinching realism. Occupation challenges the reader to hold steady on this journey into the souls of its characters.

Fuks, widely acknowledged to be one of Brazil’s most exciting young writers, crafts his novels with supreme confidence. Scenes of intense emotion are allowed to develop softly with an assumption of the reader’s intelligent reading of the suffering within. It is this authorial trust that allows the story to confront pain, loss, and grief as unrelentingly as it does without becoming stale.

It is difficult to articulate the needling intensity of Fuks’ depiction of grief, and anyone who has lived through profound moments of sadness will recognise, with a familiar relieved exhalation, the communion that can be shared by exorcising such pain from ourselves and laying it down before another for them to examine with, we can only hope, compassion and a desire to help us recover.

The idea that grief is an unavoidable part of life is what drives this novel. Not the immediate stinging cut of loss, but the scars that remain. Doors close, lights dim, waves roll with ceaseless energy that we cannot match; traffic rumbles by even when we cannot imagine embarking on our own journeys. Life moves around us, and it moves through us, and, this novel reminds us: it is all so fleeting.

Occupation asks a lot of its readers, but it gives in equal measure; and when you do come up for air, you look around you with a renewed and invigorated sense of the space you occupy in your own life. Superb.

Occupation is published by Charco Press, 17th August 2021