Review no 50: Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt (USA)

THE AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

****

This newly published US page-turner, to which the film rights were snapped up a full year before publication, has attracted huge amounts of publicity and not a little controversy. The novel was at the centre of a bidding war by nine rival publishers, which resulted in a seven-figure book deal for author Jeanine Cummins.

The book tells the story of a middle-class Mexican wife, mother and bookstore-owner, Lydia, and her 8-year-old son Luca, who are forced to flee their home town of Acapulco and attempt to seek refuge in the USA after 16 members of their extended family are gunned down by narcos at her niece’s quinceañera. The murders are carried out by local drugs cartel Los Jardineros, following a newspaper article by Lydia’s husband Sebastian, an investigative journalist who has recently profiled the cartel’s boss, the charismatic Javier Crespo.

The book is a vivid and compelling read, and a timely examination of the often treacherous and desperate migrant experience, at the mercy of terrifying journeys and the honesty (or otherwise) of people traffickers, although I feel it is not necessarily the “literary triumph” the book’s publisher claims it to be.

Cummins spent seven years working on the novel, and carried out painstaking research into the plight of migrants. I’m not entirely clueless about the opposing perspectives around illicit migration, but here in the UK I was somehow totally unaware that, with a passenger rail system almost non-existent in Mexico, migrants often feel compelled to ride illegally and dangerously on the top of freight trains or el train de la muerte (the death train) as they make their way north.

The book has sparked debate, as some critics have accused Cummins of appropriating the migrant experience from a position of privilege and for her own gain. The US book tour was even cancelled amid threats to the safety of both booksellers and the author, after charges that the publishers were marketing “trauma porn”.

Cummins herself has anticipated criticism, and in an author’s note at the end of the book writes “I worried that as a nonmigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants …. But then, I thought, If you’re person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?” I think this is legitimate; the onus is on the reader not to confine themselves to this particular US author, since there are plenty of Latin American perspectives to discover too.

As Kenan Malik has recently written for The Observer: “let us not create gated cultures in which only those of the right identity have permission to use their imaginations.” He also quotes the writer Zadie Smith: “what insults my soul is the idea … that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.”

Despite some implausibilities (in particular, it didn’t ring true to me that Luca was only eight years of age, he seemed much older), and some clumsy writing, American Dirt tells a gripping story. Notably, the book will be relatable for many in its depiction of the very normality of Lydia’s life before the tragedy that destroys her world. And its undeniable accessibility could mean that larger numbers of people find themselves sympathetic to, and better informed about, the human stories behind the impersonal immigration statistics that they hear in the news.

Some critics of American Dirt have said that they do not mind if white, US authors write about Mexican immigrants. What does bother them is when white, US authors write badly about Mexican immigrants. And despite some comparisons with John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, American Dirt isn’t a literary feat, with its at times clunky dialogue and an often ‘by numbers’ plot. What it is, though, is absorbing, informative, thrilling and genuinely moving.

Review no 49: Snow, Dog, Foot, Claudio Morandini (Italy)

Translated from the Italian by J Ockenden

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****

Snow, Dog, Foot is published here in the UK by Peirene Press. I like the USP of Peirene, a “boutique” publisher of contemporary, high-quality European literature. They also offer a subscription service, which provides readers with three novellas a year, on a loose theme. Snow, Dog, Foot forms part of 2020’s “Closed Universe” series (prior to that the theme was “There Be Monsters”, and I have a copy of Virve Sammalkorpi’s Children of the Cave on my heaving shelf of books waiting to be read).

I was new to Claudio Morandini, although Snow, Dog, Foot (originally published in 2015 as Neve, cane, piede) is his sixth novel. The book was a bestseller in Italy, and a recipient of the Procida-Isola di Arturo-Elsa Morante Prize for fiction and poetry.

When I saw that the story involved the somewhat leftfield relationship between an old man and a dog, I was reminded of the premise of the blackly humorous book Timoleon Vieta Comes Home by Dan Rhodes, which I read many years ago and loved. Nevertheless, I was also immediately primed for the potential for untenable levels of whimsy.

Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised at how very enjoyable this beautifully translated novel is. The elderly and misanthropic Adelmo Farandola lives alone on an inhospitable Alpine mountainside, and each winter snows himself in with the barest of supplies, while year-round he avoids contact with others except when it is absolutely necessary (for example in order to restock his store of provisions).

The old man’s memory is poor, and his grip on reality fluctuates; maybe he is demented. Inadvertently, and not a little reluctantly, he acquires a stray dog:

“But he’s got attached to the mongrel, and when he goes away it feels as though something inside him has died a little, and time slows down until it seems to stop altogether, and the narrow valley expands until it becomes an immense desert, and he shrinks inside this desert until he’s no bigger than an ant or a worm. A mere dog can reduce him to this. God knows what effect a human being would have. Just imagine, purely hypothetically, what effect a woman would have.“

He begins to talk to the dog, who (more surprisingly) seems to talk back, saying very doggish things, interspersed with the occasional unexpected soliloquy. Meanwhile, a local ranger is displaying an unwelcome interest in Adelmo. The dog often works as a sort of alter ego, reflecting back at Adelmo his determination to survive the harsh winter, and the seasonal routines of the old man’s life acquire a kind of perverse logic as you are drawn into his world. However, as the welcome thaw approaches, Adelmo and the dog discover a human foot, creating a new, seemingly implacable challenge to their peaceful, if life-threateningly harsh, existence.

Snow, Dog, Foot is a book that is difficult to categorise. In one way it is a survival story, and in another a mystery. It is sometimes very dark, and often very witty, while Adelmo’s occasional flashes of youthful memory hint at a normal childhood, and the enduring effects of war-time trauma. The book contains wonderfully evocative descriptive passages about the snow and the natural environment, and the prose is lyrical and elemental and visceral. Overall, Snow, Dog, Foot is a charming, tragi-comic tale that I can recommend unreservedly.

Review no 48: The Personal History of David Copperfield, film by Armando Iannucci (UK)

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This adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, written and directed by Armando Iannucci, was just released in the UK and has its US release in May.

I haven’t read the novel, though I do know that David Copperfield is considered to be Dickens’ most autobiographical work (with his protagonist’s initials being his own, reversed).

I went to see the film with my husband and kids for a bit of a birthday treat, although my announcement of how I wanted to spend the evening didn’t go down well with everyone. My son, remembering having watched the trailer when we went to see Jojo Rabbit, muttered “hmm, is it that one with all the olden-timey people in it?” and then announced that he planned to hide on the night in question so he wouldn’t have to go. Our house is fairly small, without a ton of hiding places, so I told him all objections were futile; plus, you have to make concessions to other people’s wants on their birthday, so there.

He was mildly placated when he learnt it was a comedy, and it was proper laugh-out-loud funny in places and the antithesis of a typical Sunday night British costume drama. I like Hugh Laurie in anything, and the same goes for Tilda Swinton. The cast included many other favourites of the British small and big screen too, with a diverse cast that includes Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire, Lion) as David Copperfield; Ben Whishaw as the obsequious and creepy Uriah Heep, Peter Capaldi as Mr Micawber; Paul Whitehouse; Anna Maxwell-Martin; Nikki Amuka-Bird; and Morfydd Clark in a dual role as both David Copperfield’s mother and his improbably ringletted, lapdog-toting love interest. (Mummy issues, anyone?)

Iannucci, known for productions such as The Death of Stalin and The Thick of It, has lost his usual cynicism for this film, making it a warm-hearted, family friendly romp. The storyline was often pleasantly surreal, but it all hung together, and the film overall is an enjoyable ode to writing and to the liberation offered by a creative outlet.

Review no 47: Ismail Kadare, Broken April/The Doll (Albania)

Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson

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Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best known writer internationally, and the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005 for his body of work. In Albania he seems to be best known for his poetry, but elsewhere he is well-known for his fiction.

Although on this blog I usually discuss only one book by each chosen author, while I was reading Broken April (published in 1978 and translated in 1990) I unexpectedly discovered that Kadare’s most recent book The Doll (originally published in 2015) was being published imminently in English translation and was receiving some early publicity. I thought it would be interesting to read a copy of that book, too, to get a bit of perspective on Kadare before posting a review of both books.

Kadare left Albania in 1990, seeking political asylum in France, amid unsurpassable tensions with the communist regime under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, who was born in Kadare’s home city of Gjirokaster.

Kadare’s work is renowned for examining oppositions: between the traditional and the modern; between knowledge and ignorance; between civilisation and the untamed; and between freedom and power. These enduring themes are evident in both books.

Broken April is probably Kadare’s best-known work. It is a broodingly and beautifully mournful tale exploring and challenging the historic Albanian tradition of the blood feud or vendetta, regulated by the Kanun, or the code of customary law. The novel is entirely of itself, unlike any book I’ve read before, an atmospheric and exciting combination of myth and melodrama.

The novel comprises different sections, initially giving us the fatalistic perspective of Gjorg, a young man caught up in a self-perpetuating cycle of vengeance and counter-vengeance, which sees lives snuffed out because of a tradition that no one can quite unravel. His particular blood feud has been going for 70 years, being precipitated by a random and unfortunate series of events, and then perpetuated for generations.

“He could not put out of his mind that icy morning in January when his father had called him to the great room … the world shone like glass, and with a kind of crystal madness it seemed that it might begin to slip at any moment and shatter into thousands of fragments. It was that sort of morning when his father reminded him of his duty. Gjorg was sitting by the window, listening to his father who spoke to him of blood. The whole world was stained with it. It shone red upon the snow, pools of it spread and stiffened everywhere.”

Meanwhile, a honeymooning couple from Tirana, Bessian (who really loves a good long mansplain) and Diana, are passing through the mountains, observing the people outside their carriage with cosmopolitan amusement. In a way, they are the reader, regarding with a mixture of bemusement and fascination the customs of a seemingly less sophisticated people. But they are also awed by the romance and tragic heroism that such careless sacrifice of young lives represents.

Finally, we have a glimpse into the cynical bureaucracy behind the blood feuds, and the monies raised by such feuds, perpetuated by the mysterious Prince of Osh.

Having read Broken April, having declared Kadare a genius, and having ordered another of his earlier books (The Successor, if you’re interested), reading The Doll immediately afterwards felt like a real let-down, as in this sort-of memoir Kadare can come across as narcissistic (albeit well aware of it), boorish and misogynistic, despite some obscurely humorous moments.

The Doll opens with Kadare’s return to Albania in 1994, when his mother, the “doll” of the title, is mortally ill. Kadare tries to describe his relationship with this fragile and sensitive woman, who married his father at just 17 years of age, in a wedding arranged by the respective families. But he is hindered by “a fog that fell across either her description or my imagination“.

Kadare’s mother seemed to him “a draft mother or an outline sketch“, drifting round their huge, Gothic, labyrinthine, ancestral home (now an Ismail Kadare museum), which even included a dungeon.

From the beginning of her marriage, ‘The Doll’ came into immediate conflict with her mother-in-law, whose family examined her through their lorgnettes. As in Broken April, mysterious customs abound:

“The custom of elderly women not leaving the house was one of the city’s most puzzling traditions. Nobody knew the reason for it, or even its origin or the event that prompted it. A certain lady would announce one day that she would leave the house no more, and nobody would ask why or wherefore.”

Kadare felt that his mother “surrendered the freedom and authority of a mother – in short turned herself into a doll – to give me all possible liberty as a human being, in a world where freedom was so rare and hard to find, like crusts of rationed bread in the time of the Germans, which she broke off from her own small portion and secretly gave to me.”

This sounds to me like a sort of quiet heroism, but Kadare often seems almost disdainful of his mother’s limited understanding of the intellectual world he inhabited as he grew older, of her fears that she might lose her son as he became successful, and of evidence of her quiet self-regard.

The Doll is not the place to begin with Kadare. I’m glad I read the mesmerising Broken April first, and am very much looking forward to getting to grips with more of his early novels.

Review no 46: Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (Antigua and Barbuda)

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

This was a very enjoyable, quick read. The novel (published in 1990) starts off as an engaging coming of age story about a girl from the West Indies arriving in North America as an au pair, although Lucy’s resentment and anger become increasingly evident as the book progresses.

The book reads in many way as an autobiographical account, and matches many details in the life of Jamaica Kincaid (who was born in Antigua and now lives in the USA), although it is described unequivocally on the cover as a novel.

The teenage protagonist Lucy is direct and sympathetic, and she experiences a total culture shock on arriving in North America, where she helps to care for the four little girls of the wealthy Mariah and Lewis. Lucy’s world is described in sensual but sparse prose, and her bewilderment at the delight Mariah displays in what Lucy sees as the most banal things is evident.

“So Mariah is made to feel alive by some flowers bending in the breeze. How does a person get to be that way?”

Lucy remembers being forced, at the age of 10, to learn a poem about daffodils at school – presumably a reference to Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils – and how she felt a fury that she could not place at being forced to learn stanza after stanza of a poem from another country about a flower that she’s never seen.

“…inside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem.”

Mariah shows a maternal concern for Lucy, encouraging her interests and buying her membership of a local museum. Lucy, although loved back home, comes from a harsher maternal environment. Her relationship with her mother is more honest in some ways than her relationship with Mariah, but much, nevertheless, has still remained unsaid. Lucy has vowed to cut herself off from her mother, and never to return home, although the nature of her mother’s perceived betrayal is not clear until well into the novel.

Meanwhile, Mariah and Lewis have a relationship that is externally perfect, although it becomes evident that there are seething undercurrents of discord and resentment, encapsulated early on by a particularly disturbing scene involving the death of a rabbit.

Lucy meets bland, entitled, rich people at parties hosted by Mariah and Lewis:

“They had names like Peters, Smith, Jones and Richards – names that were easy on the tongue, names that made the world spin. They had somehow all been to the islands – by that they meant the place where I was from – and had fun there. I decided not to like them just on that basis … somehow it made me ashamed to come from a place where the only thing to be said about it was ‘I had fun when I was there.'”

Describing this book as a post-colonial, feminist novel examining the immigrant experience in North America – a valid description! – might easily make the novel sound both heavy and off-putting. Instead, it is a beautifully constructed, intensely readable account of an girl on the brink of adulthood interrogating her assumptions about the world and, importantly, the assumptions of those around her.

I see this novel as an example of how my project to read work from all over the world is giving me the opportunity to enjoy the pick of the crop of authors world-wide. I would have been hugely unlikely to have come across this book without this project, and even less likely to have picked it up and read it if I did, but having done so I would be more than happy to read more of Jamaica Kincaid’s work.

Review no 45: Dora Maar (1907-97), artist (France)

@ Tate Modern, London, until 15 March 2020

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Dora Maar (born Henrietta Markovitch) is perhaps best known as “Picasso’s girlfriend”. However, what has been too often overlooked is that she also created a large and impressive body of work on her own terms.

From a bourgeois background, Maar attended progressive Parisian art schools and, after moving away from painting, established her first photographic studio in 1932. As well as achieving commercial success in her fashion photography and advertising career, she went on to document social history from a leftist perspective and then made a significant contribution to the surrealist movement, before returning to painting, her first love, in the late 1930s.

You don’t see many men in a knitted one-piece swimsuit these days, do you?

Untitled fashion photograph, 1936

A re-imagining of the classical nude, featuring popular life model Assia Granatouroff (1911-82).

Maar took to the streets to document the economic depression sweeping across Europe in the 1930s. In 1933-34 she travelled to Spain and to the UK, and she also recorded life on the streets of Paris and participated in the anti-fascist Contre-Attaque (Counter-attack) movement.

Untitled (Disabled war veteran begging beside miniature boat), London, 1934

Her political beliefs brought her into close proximity with the burgeoning surrealist movement, which began to influence her work. She produced cropped and disorientating images, in a dramatic contrast to her earlier, realist work, to “evoke the immediacy of the chance encounter so prized by the surrealists” (Tate exhibition booklet). The imagery that particularly appealed to her – of eroticism, the sea, dreams, eyes – was a natural fit with the surrealist movement, and Maar was among a small number of photographers to be included in the major surrealist exhibitions of the 1930s.

Untitled (Villa for sale), 1936

“It’s a real animal but I don’t want to say which one” (Maar, 1994)

(but now thought to be an armadillo foetus)

Portrait of Ubu, 1936

Maar met Picasso when her career was at its peak, during the winter of 1935-6, and she was something of a muse for him, inspiring a period of new creative intensity, after months of inactivity. Picasso also encouraged Maar to take up painting once again. Their relationship endured until 1945, after which she fell into a period of severe depression. However, since, Picasso first met Maar in a Parisian cafe as she “repeatedly stabbed a knife between her black-gloved fingers, occasionally drawing blood“, her mood disorder was unlikely to be solely attributable to her break-up.

Although Maar remained creative throughout her life, with traditional landscape painting as well as a move towards abstraction, for me it is her photographs that hold the most fascination. The quality of the work that came after her relationship with Picasso does not even begin to reach her earlier heights, whether due to her breakdown, or whether she simply preferred to focus (contentedly?) on other areas of creative output.

It is to be hoped that this fascinating exhibition may serve to correct to some degree the imbalance in the artistic reputations of Maar and Picasso.

Untitled oil painting, 1950s

Review no 44: Michèle Gazier: Virginia Woolf (Andorra)

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As I’ve committed to looking at culture from all over the world, I realised I needed to start seeking out some work from smaller countries, not only large countries with huge populations and a wide choice of authors in translation. Andorra is tiny, with an area of less than 500 sq km and a population of about 80,000.

Writer Michèle Gazier was born in Andorra, although she now lives in France. Her work didn’t seem to be available in English, but I found a book in French that I thought wouldn’t send me reaching for the dictionary too often – a graphic novel about the life of Virginia Woolf, with beautiful, rich illustrations by Bernard Ciccolini. I’m a bit of an admirer of Woolf, but my knowledge of her life was quite bitty and incomplete, so I was genuinely interested to read this book and find out more, without investing (yet) in a massive doorstop of an autobiography. And I got to discover an Andorran writer at the same time!

The book, published in 2011, is part of a series entitled “Grand Destins de Femme” that seeks to provide potted biographies of important women throughout history. Gazier and Ciccolini, along with other writers and illustrators, worked on other books in this series, which includes studies of Coco Chanel, Isadora Duncan, Hannah Arendt and more.

Although the graphic novel format meant this was a simplified and slightly simplistic life (and the book is short, at around 90 pages), the ups and downs of Woolf’s life were undiluted. I learnt about her childhood and love of summer at St Ives, various escapades she took part in as a young woman (such as the Dreadnought hoax of 1910 – which wouldn’t go down quite so well nowadays), her travels and her marriage to Leonard Woolf, in addition to the development of her career as a writer, publisher and critic.

Although in many ways privileged, Woolf had more than her fair share of early losses: her beloved mother died when she was 13, her older, substitute mother-figure of an elder sister, Stella, when she was 15, her authoritarian but much-loved father when she was 22, and her brother and soul mate, Thoby, when she was 24.

The chronology, once Woolf was out of childhood, seemed a bit loose in places, but this book was a fun and informative read, albeit admittedly a bit niche for the tastes of most English-speaking readers of this blog! However, if you’re looking for way to refresh or improve your French, the books in this series are a great way to do it, while learning more about the lives of some important and influential women.

Review no 43: Romesh Gunesekera, Suncatcher (Sri Lanka)

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

In this new release, set in 1960s Colombo, a young boy, Kairo, befriends an older teenager, the Gatsby-esque Jay, characterised by an alluring combination of macho self-confidence, practical proficiency and effortless daring. Kairo’s left-leaning family seem worlds apart from Jay’s life of cossetted wealth, and Kairo is entranced by Jay’s laid-back glamour, not to mention his success with the opposite sex. Jay has a menagerie of animals, including an aviary of captive wild birds, and lives with his decorous mother and intimidating father in the rambling Casa Lihiniya, complete with stables and garages full of cars collected by his Uncle Elvin. To Kairo it is a dream world: “A gilded castle complete with secret passages, captured animals and a mesmerising queen. A whole cosmos far, far more thrilling than the one I’ve been born into.”

As the boys’ friendship intensifies, they and Jay’s Uncle Elvin travel to the family’s wild estate bungalow, Villa Agathon, a journey “as fantastical as a trip to Mars or Moscow“. There the boys run wild, although when the estate-hand’s son is seriously injured in a sort of over-zealous cowboys and Indians game, both Jay and his uncle seem disturbingly unconcerned.

In many ways this coming-of-age tale seems terribly familiar, even if the setting doesn’t. It often feels like nothing actually happens, even when, from time to time, things do happen, sometimes devastatingly. And while the tumescent prose vividly evokes the long, adolescent heat-soaked days, it doesn’t always serve to drive the narrative or particularly propel the reader into turning the page.

However, the language used to describe post-independence Ceylon is often very beautiful, and the descriptions of the boys’ interactions with the natural habitat around them are lushly drawn, and at their most innocent reminiscent of the childhood adventures portrayed by Gerald Durrell.

Both boys’ families are similar in one way, and that is their background of marital discord (or marital schism in the case of Jay’s parents). The repeated allusions to cages, to tamed wild animals and to efforts to protect Jay’s aviary from predators are surely symbolic, whether of the threat posed by the economic, social and political changes taking place, the restraints of domesticity, or Jay’s desperate efforts to impose some kind of (pecking?) order on his unpredictable family and increasingly rivalrous followers.

Romesh Gunesekera was born in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, growing up there as well as in the Philippines, before becoming a British citizen. The British Council website tells us that: “it is less productive to read Gunesekera’s fiction as a romantic or nostalgic attempt to come to terms with the loss of a homeland, or … to generate fictional forms of imaginative return, than as a [an] unravelling of the ways … the discontinuities of time … collapse spatial and temporal boundaries, creating as T. S. Eliot once put it, ‘the still point of the turning world’.”

Review no 42: Little Women, film by Greta Gerwig (USA)

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

I read Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women as a kid, and having put myself through that, I didn’t really fancy the film. As a kid I remember being agog that the reader was expected to believe that such perfect and selfless people could exist in the world. Teenagers who would give away their Christmas goodies to the poor without even blanching just a teeny, tiny bit. The book, as I remembered it, felt like being beaten to death with a Bible and relentlessly castigated for my own moral failings.

But maybe I’d remembered it wrong? I was only about 10 years old then, after all. What’s more, it felt as though literally every single person I spoke to over the last couple of weeks couldn’t stop talking about the film: the costumes, the amazing direction, the performances, how emotional it was, etc etc. People kept inviting me to come with them to see it. It was obviously an “event” movie. So I finally succumbed to peer pressure and went to see the film with my eldest daughter.

This new adaptation of the novel, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, has a great, positive message about women, that I fully buy into, about privileging stories about the inner life, and allowing emotions and feelings to take centre stage over action and intrigue, and about valuing independence, not rushing into marriage, not marrying as a financial transaction, and not feeling obliged to get married at all, if that’s not your bag. The movie was beautifully filmed and, yes, the costumes were lush, but it was mostly really, really boring. I was genuinely more entertained by the much-derided, universally panned Cats than by this film.

As the love interest boy next door, I felt Timothée Chalamet was wildly miscast. He has no natural chutzpah, and lacks sex appeal or even charm. The women were much better, and they were played with a kind of kinetic ebullience, rather than complying with the buttoned-up 19th century stereotypes. Saoirse Ronan was good as the closeted Jo, and I liked Florence Pugh as Amy and Emma Watson as Meg. When the insipid Beth (Eiza Scanlan) died (surely not a spoiler, given the book was published in 1868), I did manage to dredge up a single tear.

I checked my watch a few times, while the huge man to my right, obviously dragged along to the film by his wife, overflowed into my seat and snored into my ear intermittently.

I can’t recommend this film to you, but no doubt everyone else you speak to will.

Review no 41: José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion (Angola)

Translated by Daniel Hahn

AFRICA

The trouble with reading books from around the world is that there are so many war stories. Sometimes it feels as though every work of translated fiction I read is set in a war zone, past or present. Obviously I recognise the importance of hearing people’s stories and being informed of the personal significance of country-specific events. But surely there are many books written by authors from other continents and ripe for translation that are not war literature? The alternative would be as ludicrous as if the only fiction to be translated from English into other languages was set during, say, the Second World War.

A General Theory of Oblivion, though, set during the Angolan War of Independence (1961-1974) and the civil war that followed (1975-2002), provides a welcome new perspective on conflict. Although described by Agualusa as a work of “pure fiction”, in the Foreword he also acknowledges a debt to the apparently true story of a Portuguese woman living in Angola, who, on the eve of independence, bricked herself into her apartment in the country’s capital, Luanda, and survived there alone for decades.

The novel was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, but lost out to Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. However, it subsequently succeeded in winning the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award.

The story is related by an omniscient narrator, who pursues a number of disparate strands, then expertly weaves them all together. I found the novel at times somewhat reminiscent of Louis de Bernieres’ The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, and at other times it reminded of Salman Rushdie‘s intellectual ebullience, but without his air of self-congratulatory smugness.

The most fascinating parts of the story, for me, were the accounts of the day-to-day survival of Ludo who, following the disappearance of her sister and her brother-in-law, bricks herself into her luxury apartment with only a dog, Phantom, for company, creating as the years pass a “general theory of oblivion”.

Angola proves itself adept at creating a sort of oblivion, too, through its post-independence inconsistencies and reversals, enacted by a cast of colourful characters.

“After the death of the first president, the regime experimented with a hesitant opening-up. Those political prisoners not linked to the armed opposition were released. Some received invitations to occupy positions in the apparatus of the State.“

and:

“Guys who just months ago had been railing against bourgeois democracy, at family lunches and parties, at demonstrations, in newspaper articles, were now dressed in designer clothing, driving around the city in cars that gleamed.”

This is one of the first books in translation I’ve read where I’ve paused to consider just how skilful the translator is. Although I don’t read Portuguese, and so don’t know the language of the original text, passages such as this impressed me, with their careful alliteration and assonance:

“The dogs held out on the city streets for some years. Wild packs of pedigree dogs. Gangly greyhounds, heavy asthmatic mastiffs, demented Dalmations, disappointed pointers...”

I really loved the overall conceit of the novel, as well as its implementation and the use of language. I also found appealing the flights of imagination, with bizarre tales of an orphaned pygmy hippo that is taught “to dance the Zaire rumba“, and pigeons carrying hidden messages between lovers. Overall, an original and satisfying read.