Martín Kohan

“As a writer I could refer to a certain tradition, which advises to go further to be able to tell the story from close. Where does the novel Dos veces junio take place? In my quarter. When I was a little boy, until the age of fifteen, my family lived seven blocks away from navy headquarters, one of the neuralgic points of the army junta, a place, where during the past regime people were captured illegally, tortured and even killed. I remember terrible things from that time: there used to be electricity failures, but in our quarter there was never a single failure. And while there were other planned failures elsewhere, I never experienced anything alike in our place. And now we know why: torturers needed constant electricity supply.”

“Interviewer: „Dos veces junio from 2002 is possibly the very first Argentinian novel, where the members of a repressive apparatus of the last dictatorship are given voice, is that right?“ – „In this respect Dos veces junio has at least a single predecessor, a novel called Villa by Luis Gusmán from 1996, which my book also refers to. Neither Villa, nor Dos veces junio work with the repressive discourse, but with a mediator figure. It is not a figure of an ideologist of a repression or a torturer´s voice, in case of Dos veces junio the story is not even told by a doctor, but a subordinate. I believe that I went a step further than Gusmán, as his Villa is a doctor, while Dos veces junio is told by the doctor´s driver. So the torturer is given orders from his superior, a doctor is one step below, who assist the torturer and keeps the prisoner alive, and one more step down is a the doctor´s driver.”