Read this book at my pen friend’s recommendation. Novel by Jose Eduardo Agualusa. Translated from Portugese. It is about a woman, in Angola, living in an apartment locked out from the world for over thirty years, surviving.
But perhaps it is also a quiet thank-you note to the simple joys of reading. A reader cannot help but note the sentences of reading-love spread throughout the book. I have collected some, here they are:
On the apartment, the books
Orlando owned a valuable library - thousands of titles, in Portugese, French, Spanish, English and German, among which almost all the great classics of universal literature were to be found.
The misreading
My weakness, my vanishing eyesight, it means I stumble over letters as I read. I read pages I've read so many times before, but they're different now. I get things wrong, as I read, and in those mistakes, sometimes, I find incredible things that are right.
Further,
If I still had the space, the charcoal, and available walls, I could compose a great work about forgetting: a general theory of oblivion.
I realise I have transformed the entire apartment into a huge book. After burning the library, after I have died, all that remains will be my voice.
The books, burnt
Whenever she wanted to go out she would look for a book in the library. She felt, as she went on burning those 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 Jose Amado she stopped being able to visit Ilheus and Sao Salvador. BurningUlysses, by Joyce, she had lost Dublin. Getting rid of Three Trapped Tigers, she incinerated old Havana. There were fewer than a hundred books left. She kept them more out of stubbornness than to make any use of them.
The boy learning to read
Then the boy did the washing-up and put away the crockery. He roamed about the house, curious:
'You know you've got a lot of books.'
'A lot of books? Yes, I did have a lot. There aren't many now.'
'I've never seen so many.'
'Can you read?'
'I'm not very good at putting the letters together. I only did one year at school.'
'Would you like me to teach you? I'll teach you to read and then you can read to me.'
Subalu learned to read while Ludo convalesced.
The doorman
Nasser Evangelista was pleased with his new job. He wore a blue uniform, very clean, and spent most of his time sitting at a desk, reading, while he watched the foor out the corner of his eye. He had developed his taste for reading during the years spent locked up in Sao Paulo prison in Luanda.
...That morning, Nasser Evangelista was rereading, for the seventh time, tge adventures of Robinson Crusoe..
Monte and his retirement
He planned to spend his final years rereading Jorge Amado, Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Luandino Vieira, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The woman, now old:
'My family is this boy, that mulemba tree out there, and a phantom dog. My eyesight gets worse every day... In any case, I don't aspire to any more: the light, Sabalu reading to me, the joy of a pomegranate every day.'
***
Lots about books, and reading.
And just perhaps how nature feels about her human children. So lost in ideas, forgetting the basics. Some sensible advice:
'You can eat better without spending more', she explained to Little Chief. 'You and your friends fill your mouths with big words - Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution - and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don't feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables, and a good fish broth at least once a week. I'm only interested in the kinds of revolution that starts off by getting people sat at the table.'
***
Another little beauty:
Exorcism
I carve out verses
short
as prayers
words are
legions
of demons
expelled
I cut adverbs
pronouns
I spare my
wrists
***
The book itself didn’t take long to read. In a long while have I read something this quickly. Just a few hours. It reminded me briefly of 2666, Bolano. Just an image.
Brief chapters, interspersed with empty title pages, the chapter titles like a poem running through the book, a lot of breathing space yet keeps you moving quick. Things converge, things so disparate converge… in a set of coincidences that forms the core narrative. But it is not a narrative. Perhaps a brief sketch. Underlying the sketch is a personal tragedy, that doesn’t make itself felt, except perhaps in the eccentricities. I feel that there is still an affirming of life in the book. The argument of to be or not to be is more between memory and forgetting. A general theory of oblivion.
Enjoyed the read.