The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

A General Theory of Oblivion
by José Eduardo Agualusa
translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
Angola


Available in the U.K. from Harvill Secker


Available in the U.S. from Archipelago Books

A General Theory of Oblivion is a wild patchwork of a novel that tells the story of Angola through Ludo, a woman who bricks herself into her apartment on the eve of Angolan independence. For the next 30 years she lives off vegetables and pigeons, and burns her furniture to stay warm. But the outside world seeps in, through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird’s foot. Until one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace. With the author’s trademark playfulness, humor and warmth, A General Theory of Oblivion is a dazzling novel of human drama and the thrills, hopes and dangers of radical change.

Agualusa won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007, with his translator Daniel Hahn, for The Book of Chameleons. This is the pair’s fifth collaboration and Hahn is one of our most experienced translators. Such experience shows in tiny interventions to guide the English reader through the chaos of the Angolan battlefield (“Portuguese mercenaries”, for example, when the original has just “mercenaries”), and in his taking confident ownership of certain descriptive passages, ensuring the music of the original is conveyed along with the meaning (packs of stray dogs, for instance, are made up of “gangly greyhounds, asthmatic mastiffs, demented Dalmations, disappointed pointers”).
~Jethro Soutar in The Independent

Easy answers are not provided, nor should they be. And to give away too much about the novel’s many revelatory concluding moments would be to spoil Agualusa’s exceptional artistry. A General Theory of Oblivion is both more and less than its title; it certainly provides a kind of blueprint of the encroaching obscurity inherent to living and dying — at times bemoaning its certainty, at times celebrating the assured darkness — but it is also a general theory of love, of life, and, finally, of literature.
~Dustin Illingworth in The Quarterly Conversation

Impressive although I wouldn't put it on the shortlist due to the tough competition, it's relative slightness and also the author has already won the IFFP before.

My review:
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"Os dias deslizam como se fossem líquidos. Não tenho mais cadernos onde escrever. Também não tenho mais canetas. Escrevo nas paredes, com pedaços de carvão, versos sucintos.

Poupo na comida, na água, no fogo e nos adjetivos"

"The days slide by as if they were liquid. I have no more notebooks to write in. No more pens either. I write on the walls with pieces of charcoal, brief lines.

I save on food, on water, on fire and on adjectives."

"Teoria Geral do Esquecimento" by José Eduardo Agualusa was translated by the prolific and talented Daniel Hahn as "A General Theory of Oblivion".

It tells the story of Ludovica Fernandes ("Ludo") Mano, a Portuguese woman living in Luanda. Following Angolan independence in 1975, and scared of what was happening outside, she bricked up the entrance to her apartment, staying there for 28 years.

In the preface Agualusa claims this is based on a real-life story, and that the diaries of the real-life Ludo "helped me, I believe, to understand her. In the pages that follow, I have made much use of her first-hand accounts, What you read is, however, fiction. Pure fiction."

In the novel Ludo move to Luanda with her sister, who had married an Angolan. Even before the events in the novel she was a recluse:

"Ludovica never liked having to face the sky. While still only a little girl, she was horrified by open spaces. She felt, upon leaving the house, fragile and vulnerable, like a turtle whose shell had been torn off. When she was small - six, seven years old - she was already refusing to go to school without the protection of a vast black umbrella, whatever the weather. Neither her parent's annoyance nor the cruel mockery of the other children deterred her. Later on, it got better. Until what she called 'The Accident' happened and she started to look back on this feeling of primordial dread as something like a premonition."

The novel consists of short (3-4 pages) episodic chapters, mixed in with extracts from Ludo's diaries and poems. It's deliberately light on the details of how someone can survive, on their own and undetected, for such a long period, but Ludo at first seeks refuge in her brother-in-law's extensive library ("among which almost all the great classics of universal literature were to be found") but later has to burn the books for fuel.

"Often, as she looked out over the crowds that clashed violently against the sides of the building, that vast uproar of car horns and whistles, cries and entreaties and curses, she experienced a profound terror, a feeling of siege and regret. Whenever she wanted to go out she would look for a book in the library.

She felt, as she went on burning the books, after having burned all the furniture, the doors, the wooden floor tiles, that she was losing her freedom. It was as though she was incinerating the whole planet. When she burned Jorge Amado, she stopped being able to visit Ilheus and Sao Salvador. Burning Ulysses, by James Joyce, she had lost Dublin. Getting rid of Three Trapped Tigers, she incinerated old Havana."

Instead she resorts to writing on the wall, and as even that capacity runs out laments:

“If I still had the space, the charcoal, and available walls, I could compose a great work about forgetting: a general theory of oblivion.”

Her story is interwoven with that of a disparate cast in the city and country outside. The Angolan civil war rages, and all of the characters are caught up in the political turmoil, but the novel very much covers this at the personal rather than geo-political level: one will find only limited mention of UNITA, the MPLA etc.

These different characters turn out to be linked both to each other, and also to Mano. A chapter documenting one such link is entitled "the subtle architecture of chance", but in practice the connections multiply to an extent that they rather stretch the reader's credence, culminating in a brief set piece scene where they all, somehow, coincidentally arrive simultaneously at Ludo's apartment. Indeed the coincidences are so exaggerated that one assumes Agualusa did this for deliberate artistic effect: as one character notes ""A man with a good story is practically a king."

A crucial theme of the novel is of oblivion, in the sense of forgetting. Most of the characters have a past - things they did and things done to them - that they would rather forget. Of one, a former secret policeman, we learn: “There are some people who experience a fear of being forgotten. It's a pathology called athazagoraphobia. The opposite happened to him, he lived in terror that he would never be forgotten."

Mano tells another, who is apologising to her: “Don't torture yourself any more. Our mistakes correct us. Perhaps we need to forget. Perhaps we should practice forgetting, reaching for oblivion.”
(“Não se atormente mais. Os erros nos corrigem. Talvez seja melhor esquecer. Devíamos praticar o esquecimento.”)]

But at the end, Mano finds that "the accident", the event from her pre-Angolan life, that most haunts her, can't be forgotten at all, as it has a real physical manifestation.

Recommended.

Didn't quite make my personal shortlist but easily could have done, so happy with this choice.

Granted, this is the only book on the shortlist I have read, but I loved it.