4 ideas
In the fictional state of Katamalanasie, the Providential Guide captures the rebel leader Martial and carves him up with a table knife. He has Martial's remains served to the man's own family and forces them to eat. Martial keeps answering that he does not want to die this death, and he returns again and again as a ghost who stains and torments the Guide.
The dictator's power depends on his victims accepting that they have been defeated. When the victim refuses that acceptance, each new atrocity shows that the regime cannot finish what it starts, and the tyrant is driven to ever more excessive cruelty. Physical destruction does not produce symbolic defeat, and the gap between the two is where the regime's authority leaks away.
Martial's daughter Chaïdana survives the massacre of her family and turns her own body into a weapon. She seduces the regime's officials and kills them one by one, so that intimacy becomes an assassination channel the regime cannot police. Resistance passes down the bloodline across generations, so the regime faces the dead man's lineage, not just one opponent.
The novel shows dictatorship through cannibalism, ghosts, and absurd bureaucratic cruelty rather than realist reportage. Its claim is that a regime which is itself irrational and hallucinatory is represented more truthfully through distortion than through documentary sobriety. Setting the fable in an invented country frees it from any one nation, so it indicts a recurring pattern of rule rather than a single tyrant.