What remains when everything’s been said? When it’s “over” and the last conversation has been had? When the son explains to the father how he’s suffocated him all his life? And when the son is now in the position to take revenge?
What remains is a deadly fiction. And the son’s horror at the realization of his own story which he wants to make his father’s story, his father’s guilt. The victim has become the perpetrator.
When Alois Hotschnig recounts the son’s story, in a language that follows the scars made by the father; he shows how self-pity makes a perpetrator of a victim and how in the stories we tell each other for relief, everyday violence is passed on to following generations.
The story is not only about the power relations between fathers and sons. It is above all about the power of fictions that are born out of deep traumas.
