In recent years Latin American artistic and literary production has seen an increase in the theme of the so-called second generation related to the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone. Temporally displaced, the generations following the dictatorship, who did not have a direct experience with the period, recover, discover, express and represent this historical period through literature. They question a possible ownership of trauma and the ways of its passing on, whether through silences, through their bodies, or different objects and/or family memories. These narratives reopen stories that had been shut down and that can only be built on what is left as remains. Family histories, marked by an imposed silence, are marked by these silences they carry on. The precariousness of these stories is manifested in narrative form. This communication will discuss the haunted transgenerational heritage: the violence and fear as parts of a family environments built by collaborators or perpetrators of the dictatorial regime. These fictional accounts are built on narratives about the transmission of this history of violence and its erased, haunting heritage. The legacy of violence appears first as a secret and, later, in the effects of these silences on life itself and on the construction of national and personal construction of identity. In this manner, narrators do not receive these violent stories from their parents' memories, but from that which remains unintegrated and unassimilated. They are haunted by the crimes committed by their parents and their generation and, thus, also became capable of incarnating shameful somatic memories in their bodies. Transmission isn't related to what is said or accounted for, but, mainly, to what remains silent and secretive and that is recovered in the search performed by the second generation and/or, still, by what is manifested somatically, in their bodies. These matters will be discussed in readings of contemporary Brazilian novels, specially from the last ten years.
