Degeneration

With a dry and harsh narrative, Degeneration is a novel about the country's current situation, from the military dictatorship to its repercussions in Bolsonaro's rise to power.

Fernando Bonassi, screenwriter, playwright, and author, is one of the most important contemporary voices we have. His writings—scripts, plays, novels, and short stories—record, from the privileged perspective of someone familiar with the ills of Brazilian society, the various setbacks Brazil has endured. His new novel, Degeneration , tells the story of a son who must free his father's body, which has just died and is in the morgue of a public hospital in São Paulo, on the eve of the election that will bring Jair Bolsonaro and the far right to power.

From this backdrop, the narrator-character then finds himself facing an intimate confrontation led by the figure of his father, which leads him to look back on the story of the two, from his childhood, going back to a traumatic episode to which his father subjected him to the discovery that, during the dictatorship, he acted as an informant and assistant to torturers, collaborating with a PM battalion.

Degeneration is a portrait of Brazilian suburbs, inhabited by a lower-middle class that fights, defends itself, and survives with every weapon at its disposal, plagued by violence and a lack of prospects. It is also a compelling interpretation of Brazilian history, from the dictatorship to the present, in which the country allowed the rise of Bolsonaro, the far right, and militias to power.