NA MESMA CENA, PASSADO E PRESENTE

MEMÓRIA E TRAUMA EM NO FUNDO DO OCEANO, OS ANIMAIS INVISÍVEIS, DE ANITA DEAK

Abstract

No fundo do oceano, os animais invisíveis, by Anita Deak, is a work dedicated to memorialistic reconstruction, through which the narrator-character, Pedro Naves, revisits his life from childhood to early adulthood. Memories emerge in the writing as repositories of significant and often traumatic events, involving persecution, torture, and death. Pedro Naves was one of the members of the armed guerrilla group that settled in the Araguaia River region, on the border of three Amazonian states, in the early 1970s. Historically, the Araguaia guerrilla, as it became known, represented one of the main organized fronts of resistance to the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985), but it met a brutal end in 1974 with the disappearance, at the hands of state agents, of the last remnants of the group. In Deak's novel, the treatment of the narrator's memories (in many ways a survivor) involves an elaborate use of literary language, with evident attention given to rich and multiple associations of meaning.