July to September 2021: The Lusophone World: writing from countries where Portuguese is or was an important language

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July to September 2021: The Lusophone World: writing from countries where Portuguese is or was an important language

1kidzdoc
Jul 1, 2021, 8:46 pm



This quarter's theme will focus on the countries and administrative regions that were part of the former Portuguese Empire, which lasted from the early 15th century to the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, the left wing military coup which marked the end of the Estado Novo dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar (1932-1968) and Marcello Caetano (1968-1974). The colonial wars fought by the Portuguese Army of the Estado Novo were deeply unpopular in the country, and in much of the Portuguese Army, and once the new Portuguese government was installed its army withdrew from these conflicts and ceded power to insurgent parties in those territories. The one exception was Portuguese Macau, which was originally leased to Portugal by the Ming Dynasty in 1557 as a trading post, and peacefully returned to the control of the People's Republic of China in 1999.

The Lusophone World comprises nine countries and the Macao Special Administrative Region, with Brazil being far and away the largest and most populous of them. Portuguese is a native language in most of these countries, save for Timor-Leste and Cape Verde, where Tetum and Cape Verdean Creole, respectively, are the primary languages.

My primary focus for this theme will be the countries other than Portugal and Brazil, although everyone is strongly encouraged to read books from those two lands, and I fully intend to read one or more Brazilian and Portuguese novels. This will also be a work in progress, as much of the literature of the Lusophone World has not yet been translated from Portuguese to English, although smaller publishing houses are beginning to make some of these translated works available in recent years. Most Lusophone countries also seem to suffer from a relative dearth of women authors, and their works are less often translated than their male counterparts. For example, Paulina Chiziane of Mozambique is the first female author to have a book published in her home country, and her novel The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy was translated into English only in 2016.

I encourage everyone to help me learn about newer and lesser known authors, published or not, and I will continue to share whatever I find here throughout the quarter, especially during my planned trip to Lisbon in September, and afterward. Some of the following posts will be incomplete initially, due to the unexpected length of time it took to research these countries and authors, but I should be able to complete them this coming weekend.

2kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 1, 2021, 9:00 pm

Angola

  

Background information:
* Official name: Republic of Angola
* Second largest country in the Lusophone world, seventh largest country in Africa
* Diogo Cão: first Portuguese explorer to reach Angola, in 1484
* * First Portuguese settlement took place in 1575, with the establishment of what is now Luanda, the nation’s capital
First incorporated as a Portuguese colony in 1655, as Portuguese West Africa
* In keeping with other African colonies governed by Portugal it was designated an overseas colony by António Salazar, the President of Portugal, in 1951
* The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) were created in the late 1950s. Both organizations actively combatted the repressive rule and inhuman living and working conditions imposed on them by colonists, and began guerrilla warfare against them in 1961, which began the Angolan War for Independence
* The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), headed by Jonas Savimbi, which fought the Portuguese mainly in central Angola
* The war ended after the Carnation Revolution on 25 April 1974, as the new Portuguese government did not support overseas campaigns against their former subjects abroad
* The three nationalist organizations, FNLA, MPLA and UNITA, were composed of different and incompatible military factions, and as soon as Angola gained its independence from Portugal in November 1975 the groups attacked each other, which lead to the Angolan Civil War (11 November 1975 - 4 April 2002) that resulted in 800,000 civilian deaths and the displacement of 4 million more Angolans

Notable Angolan authors:

* José Eduardo Agualusa (1960-)
- One of the best known and critically acclaimed Lusophone and African writers, whose 30 works have been translated into 25 languages
- Born in Huambo, Angola, studied agriculture and forestry in Lisbon, now resides on the Island of Mozambique and in Lisbon
- Recipient of the International Dublin Literary Award for A General Theory of Oblivion
- Recipient of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Book of Chameleons
- Other works available in English translation: Creole; Rainy Season; The Society of Reluctant Dreamers; My Father’s Wives

Pepetela (Artur Carlos Mauricio Pestana dos Santos) (1941-)
- Born in Benguela, Angola, fought for the MPLA during the Angolan War for Independence
- Served as the Vice Minister of Education in the first Angolan government, headed by President Agostinho Neto, from 1975-1982, until he resigned to focus on his writing
- Winner of the Camões Prize, the annual award for the most outstanding contributor to Portuguese literature, in 1997
- Notable works translated into English: Mayombe, The Return of the Water Spirit, Yaka

Ondjaki (Ndalu de Almeida) (1977-)
- writer of children’s books, poetry, fiction and short stories, memoirist, documentarian
- born in Luanda, studied Sociology at the University of Lisbon, received a Doctorate in African Studies in Italy
- widely considered one of the best young African writers, winner of numerous literary prizes including the José Saramago Prize, the São Paulo Prize for Literature, and the Prêmio Jabuti; selected as one of the 39 sub-Saharan writers under 40 for the Hay Festival’s Africa39 Project
- several of his works have been translated into English, including Good Morning Comrades and Transparent City

3kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 1, 2021, 9:02 pm

Brazil

4kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 1, 2021, 9:16 pm

Cabo Verde

  

Background information:
*Official name: Republic of Cabo Verde
* An archipelago of 10 islands (nine inhabited) and eight islets
* Located 320 miles of Cap-Vert in Senegal, the westernmost point of the African continent
* First discovered by the Portuguese in 1456; the islands were uninhabited at that time
* Became prosperous during the years of the transatlantic slave trade, as it served as a gateway between West Africa, Europe and the Americas
* Also served as a place of exile for political prisoners of Portugal and a place of refuge for Jews and other non-Christians during the Portuguese Inquisition
* The blending of ethnic groups led to the development of a unique Creole culture and language
* Slavery was first permitted in Cabo Verde in 1472, and was not abolished until 1878
* In response to citizen unrest and pressure for independence from other African colonies António Salazar, the Prime Minister of Portugal, changed the status of Cabo Verde from a colony to an overseas province in 1951
* In 1956 the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) was created, led by Amilcar Cabral, which demanded economic, political and social improvements in each country, and fought against the Portuguese in the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence from 1963-1974
* The PAIGC became politically active in Cabo Verde after the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, and in December that year PAIGC and the Portuguese government signed an agreement to create a transitional government
* The first free and fair election for national representatives was held on 30 June 1975, and after the PAIGC won 92% of the vote it was chosen as the country’s ruling party on 5 July
* After the November 1980 coup in Guinea-Bissau the relationship of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau became strained, and the PAIGC in Cape Verde was renamed the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV) that year, which ruled the country until 28 September 1990, when one party rule was abolished
* Cape Verde is now a stable democracy, and one of the most peaceful and economically developed countries in Africa

Notable Cabo Verdean authors:

André Álvares de Almada (16th-17th centuries): Possibly the first Cape Verdean writer, who wrote several historical annals about the expansion of the Portuguese Empire

Eugénio Tavares (1867-1930): Poet, composer, and creator of morna, melancholic love poems which express the soul of the Creole people of Cabo Verde

Authors of Claridade
- Literary magazine founded by Manuel Lopes, Baltasar Lopes da Silva (who wrote under the pseudonym Osvaldo Alcántara) and Jorge Barbosa in 1936, active until 1960
- Highly influential in the development of cultural, social and political consciousness in the country, particularly the development of art and literature and the growth of the country’s independence movement
- Chiquinho: A Novel of Cabo Verde by Baltasar Lopes was recently published in English translation

Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973)
- Born in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents, educated as an agricultural engineer in Lisbon
- Leader of the PAIGC, the nationalist movement of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, important pan-African intellectual and anti-colonial leader
- Gave influential speeches and wrote several important books about the struggle for African independence

Orlanda Amarílis (1924-2014): One of the most important female Cabo Verdean authors, whose novels depict the lives of everyday Cabo Verdean women

Corsino Fortes (1933-2015)
- Lawyer, judge, diplomat, member of PAICV, Cape Verdean ambassador to Portugal and France
- His poetry chronicled life under colonial rule and the struggle for independence
- Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes was published by Archipelago Books in 2015

Dina Salústio (1941-)
- One of the founders of Associação dos Escritores Cabo-verdianos (Association of Cabo Verdean Writers
- Her novel The Madwoman of Serrano was the first by a Cape Verdean female author to be published in Cabo Verde, and the first to be translated into English

Germano Almeida (1945-)
- Lawyer, attorney general of Cape Verde
- Prolific novelist, whose best known book available in English translation is The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo (1989)

Vera Duarte (1952-)
- Cabo Verdean human rights activist, government minister and politician
- Poet, essayist and novelist

5kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 1, 2021, 9:24 pm

Equatorial Guinea

  

Background information:
* official name: Republic of Equatorial Guinea (República da Guiné Equatorial)
* consists of the islands of Bioko and Annobón as well as the mainland country in west central Africa
* colonized by Portugal from 1474 to 1778, when it was ceded to Spain as part of the Treaty of El Pardo
* gained its independence from Spain in 1968
* since 1979 it has been led by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who overthrew the country’s first president, his uncle Francisco Macías Nguema

Notable Equatoguinean authors:

Most prominent authors wrote in Spanish, although Portuguese has been an official language of the country since 2010

Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo (1950-)
- writer, journalist and politician, who has served as a visiting professor at several universities in the United States and Spain, whose books introduced the world to Equatoguinean literature
- his book Shadows of Your Black Memory is an autobiographical novel about a young boy growing up in what was then Spanish Guinea, and is available in English translation

María Nsué Angüe (1945-2017)
- poet, novelist, former minister of Education and Culture, who wrote about the lives of oppressed Equatoguineans under colonial rule and the role of its women in its society
- her novel Ekomo was the first to be published by an Equatoguinean woman

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (1966-)
- prolific author and activist, who currently lives in exile in Barcelona
- at least two of his novels are available in English translation, By Night the Mountain Burns and The Gurugu Pledge

6kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 1, 2021, 9:34 pm

Guinea-Bissau

  

Background information:
* Official name: Republic of Guinea-Bissau
* Tiny West African country bordered by Senegal to the north and Guinea to the southeast
* Named after its capital, Bissau, to distinguish it from Guinea (also known as Guinea-Conakry (previously French Guinea) and Equatorial Guinea (previously Spanish Guinea)
* A portion of Guinea-Bissau formed part of the Mali Empire from 1235 to 1670
* First colonized by the Portuguese in 1588, although they were restricted to the coastal ports of Bissau and Cacheu and did not explore the country’s interior
* These ports were a key part of the slave trade until 1852, then became a source of cooking oil from peanuts
* Portugal did not invest in the country to any significant degree, and as a result its population was almost entirely illiterate and impoverished
* In 1956 Amílcar Cabral founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC)
* The PAIGC fought the Portuguese in the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence (1963-1974), which ended after the Carnation Revolution, when Portugal granted Guinea-Bissau its independence
* Guinea-Bissau remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with a mostly illiterate population and very little literature published in Portuguese

Notable Guinea-Bissauan authors:

Abdulai Silá (1958-)
- Guinea-Bissauan engineer, social researcher and economist
- Eterna Paixão (1994): first novel published in Guinea-Bissau
- A Última Tragédia (1995): first (only?) novel by a Guinea-Bissauan author translated into English, as The Ultimate Tragedy

Yasmina Nuny (?-)
- Poet from Guinea-Bissau who was born in Portugal, and lived in several African countries before moving to the United Kingdom
- She has been performing and writing poetry about her homeland since 2016, in Birmingham, UK
- Her first work of poetry, Anos Ku Ta Manda, was published in March 2021, in English translation

7kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 1, 2021, 9:44 pm

Macau

  

Background information:
* official name: Macao Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China
* leased to Portugal as a trading post by the Ming Dynasty in 1557
* transferred back to China in 1999
* now a major resort city and center for gambling tourism

Notable Macanese authors:

Luís Gonzaga Gomes (1907-1996)
- essential historian of Macau, who also translated work from Portuguese to Cantonese so that they could be widely read by residents of Macau

Deolinda da Conceição (1913-1957)
- widely read journalist, Portuguese teacher in Hong Kong, translator
- her book Cheong Sam - A Cabaia is a classic of Macanese literature, which describes the life of Chinese women and their struggles

Adé (José Inocêncio dos Santos) (1919-1993)
- prolific poet who wrote in Macanase patois, a Creole language with elements of Portuguese, Cantonese, Malay and Sinhala, which is now critically endangered and on the verge of disappearing

Henrique de Senna Fernandes (1923-2010)
- wrote several novels about the different ethnic communities in Macau during the 1930s to 1950s
- several of his books have been translated into English, including The Bewitching Braid, Love and Tiny Toes, and Father of the Orchids

8kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 1, 2021, 9:54 pm

Mozambique

  

Background information:
* Official name: República de Moçambique
* Coastal country in southeastern Africa discovered by Vasco da Gama in 1498, formally settled by the Portuguese in 1505
* During the Mozambican War for Independence (1964-1975) the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) engaged in guerrilla warfare with the Portuguese government, with a total loss of over 100,000 Mozambican and Portuguese lives; the war shifted in favor in FRELIMO after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal on 25 April 1974

Notable Mozambican authors:

Lília Momplé (1935-)
- writer, government official, film actress
- former director of the Fund for the Artistic and Cultural Development of Mozambique (Fundac)
- former general secretary and president of the Association of Writers of Mozambique (AEMO)
- her three novels describe the oppressive conditions of colonial Mozambique, which have been translated into English: No One Killed Suhura; Neighbours - The Story of a Murder; and The Eyes of the Green Snake

Paulina Chiziane (1955-)
- The first woman in Mozambique to publish a novel, Balada de Amor ao Vento
- Work focuses on social issues in Mozambique, particularly those affecting women, such as polygamy
- Her novel Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia (The First Wife: A History of Polygamy), which was translated into English and published by Archipelago Books in 2016, won the José Craveirinho Prize in 2003

Mia Couto (1955-)
- One of the most celebrated and frequently translated Lusophone authors
- Winner of the Camões Prize in 2013 and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014
- Born in Beira, Mozambique to parents who emigrated from Portugal in the 1950s
- Began to write as a teenager, moved to the capital to study medicine, but joined the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) during the Mozambican War of Independence
- On the request of FRELIMO he suspended his medical studies to become a journalist, then returned to university to study Biology
- He began writing short stories after he earned his degree, and wrote his first novel, Sleepwalking Land (Terra Sonâmbula) in 1992, which has been widely described as one of the best African novels of the 20th century; it was adapted into an award winning movie in 2007
- Other works translated into English: Confessions of a Lioness; Pensativities; The Tuner of Silences; Woman of the Ashes

José Craveirinha Prize for Literature
- annual award to the best book written by a Mozambican author given in honor of José Craveirinha (1922-2003), who is considered the leading poet of Mozambique; unfortunately none of his works have apparently been translated into English

Luís Bernardo Honwana (1942-)
- government official, member of the Executive Board of UNESCO, President of the Portuguese Language Bibliographic Fund
- his book We Killed the Tiny Dog is considered to be a masterpiece of modern Mozambican literature

9kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 1, 2021, 9:56 pm

Portugal

10kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 1, 2021, 10:03 pm

São Tomé and Príncipe

  

Background information:
* Official name: Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe
* Island country in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western coast of Equatorial Africa
* Composed of two archipelagos surrounding the main islands of São Tomé and Príncipe
* Uncolonized territory until discovered by the Portuguese in 1470, formally colonized in 1493 (São Tomé) and 1500 (Príncipe)
* Became important elements of the Atlantic slave trade and production of sugar
* The Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe (MLSTP) was created in the 1950s, in response to independence movements throughout the continent
* After the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 the new Portuguese government met with representatives of the MLSTP to form a transitional government
* On 12 July 1975 São Tomé and Príncipe gained its independence, in a bloodless transfer of power
* São Tomé and Príncipe is a stable multiparty democracy, with high levels of economic and political freedom, moderate corruption, and little crime

Literature of São Tomé and Príncipe:

- Most works have been written in Portuguese, as >98% of the population speaks the language

- Only one novel seems to have been translated into English, The Shepherd’s House (A casa do pastor) by Olinda Beja, which is not publicly available

- Two short stories by Gervásio Kaiser have been published in English and are easily available: The Moor of Sankoré and Native Dance

11kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 1, 2021, 10:11 pm

Timor-Leste (East Timor)

  

Background information:
* official name: Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste
* occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor; West Timor is part of Indonesia
* under the control of the Portuguese government, as Portuguese Timor, from 1769 to 1975
* after the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 the Portuguese abandoned its colony, and civil war broke out between warring political parties, until the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretlin) unilaterally declared independence on 28 November 1975
* fearing the installation of a communist government, the Indonesian Army overthrew the Fretlin government in December 1975 and commenced a brutal occupation of East Timor that lasted until the United Nations took over administration of it on 25 October 1999
* after East Timor’s first election on 30 August 2001 and approval of a constitution the following March it was renamed Timor-Leste, the Portuguese phrase for East Timor, and recognized as an independent nation by the United Nations on 27 September 2002

Notable authors from Timor-Leste:

Xanana Gusmão (1946-)
- President of Timor-Leste from 2002-2007, Prime Minister from 2007-2015
- known as the “Poet Warrior” of Timor-Leste for his inspirational poems in support of independence, such as Grandfather Crocodile

José Ramos-Horta (1949-)
- President of Timor-Leste from 2007-2012
- Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, along with Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, for working "towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor"
- both men have published books about the country’s history and compilations of their essays and speeches in support of independence from Indonesia

Luís Cardoso (1958-)
- prolific author who is Timor-Leste’s best known writer
- his best known work is The Crossing: A Story of East Timor, which has been translated into English

12kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 17, 2021, 12:10 pm

My reading list for The Lusophone World:

Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence, Fernando Arenas

Angola:
Creole, José Eduardo Agualusa
Good Morning Comrades, Ondjaki ✅
Rainy Season, José Eduardo Agualusa
That Hair, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida
Transparent City, Ondjaki

Cabo Verde:
The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo, Germano Almeida ✅
Cape Verdean Blues, Shauna Barbosa

Equatorial Guinea:
Shadows of Your Black Memory, Donato Ndongo
By Night the Mountain Burns, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
The Gurugu Pledge, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel

Guinea-Bissau:
The Ultimate Tragedy, Abdulai Silá
Anos Ku Ta Manda, Yasmina Nuny ✅

Moçambique:
Confession of the Lioness, Mia Couto
Sleepwalking Land, Mia Couto
The Tuner of Silences, Mia Couto ✅
Neighbours - The Story of a Murder by Lilia Momplé

Portugal:
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
The History of the Siege of Lisbon by José Saramago
Journey to Portugal by José Saramago
The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta & Maria Velho da Costa

São Tomé and Príncipe:
The Moor of Sankoré, Gervásio Kaiser ✅
Native Dance: An African Story, Gervásio Kaiser ✅

13kidzdoc
Jul 1, 2021, 10:22 pm



This thread is now open!

14LolaWalser
Jul 1, 2021, 10:51 pm

Wonderful setup, Darryl, many thanks.

I noticed yesterday when I was sorting my umpteen books-opened-on-some-page-or-other that I have Honwana's We killed the mangy-dog left over unfinished from the South Africa read, and also two of Eça de Queirós's books a quarter in, so I should have something to contribute here eventually.

15thorold
Editado: Jul 2, 2021, 3:32 am

Thanks, Darryl — I’ve been looking forward to this theme, as I’ve read very little by authors from Lusophone countries. A quick check of my memory only came up with The Lusiads and a lot of José Saramago (surely I must have read something from Brazil, but I can’t think of anything), so there’s a lot of virgin territory to explore.

On my TBR I still have one of Mia Couto’s books left over from the Southern Africa theme, and a translation of The book of disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. I also noticed Stefan Zweig’s Magellan, which is off-topic(*) but obviously relevant to the background of Portuguese imperialism.

Other than that, I don’t know yet, but Paulina Chiziane and Jorge Amado are high on the list of writers to explore.

I’m hoping to read at least a few books in Portuguese, which I started learning a couple of years ago but have never really put to use — I had a warm-up exercise by reading the offbeat little fable Jorge Amado wrote for his baby son, O gato malhado e a andorinha Sinhá, which I posted about in the Childhood thread. That was fun, and went better than I feared…

——
(*) Zweig did spend his last years in Brazil, but he wrote Magellan before he moved there, whilst in exile in the UK

16thorold
Editado: Jul 2, 2021, 1:11 am

Este mensaje fue borrado por su autor.

17MissWatson
Jul 2, 2021, 3:44 am

Thanks for setting this up!

I recently read Die vielen Talente der Schwestern Gusmao which is set in the first half of the 20th century in Rio de Janeiro which was quite fascinating. Also available in English translation.

18MissWatson
Jul 2, 2021, 3:45 am

Sorry, double post. LT acting weirdly.

19ELiz_M
Jul 2, 2021, 8:58 am

For Mozambique, I have Dumba Nengue, Run for Your Life: Peasant Tales of Tragedy in Mozambique by Lina Magaia on my TBR.

And I found a few more Angolan authors: José Luandino Vieira, Uanhenga Xitu, Manuel Rui

20SassyLassy
Editado: Jul 3, 2021, 12:22 pm

>1 kidzdoc: Really looking forward to this thread. What a great setup.

Mia Couto and Clarice Lispector are on my list of never read authors, and fit well.

There are some excellent reviews by rebeccanyc, StevenTX and others in this older thread which includes Brazil https://www.librarything.com/topic/158806 and this later one https://www.librarything.com/topic/189380#unread on the Iberian Peninsula

21HumphryClinker
Jul 2, 2021, 4:03 pm

Thank you for such a helpful and comprehensive overview.

So far, my planned Lusophone reading is:

Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki
The Book of Chameleons by Jose Agualusa
Woman of Ashes and Confessions of a Lioness by Mia Couto
Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis
Showdown by Jorge Amado
The Double by Jose Saramago
The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy by Paulina Chiziane

Time and availability permitting, I think I will also try for some Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst, and maybe a reread of the Lusiads. And perhaps The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas.

22thorold
Jul 2, 2021, 4:51 pm

>20 SassyLassy: I think something went wrong with your copy/paste! The older South America theme read (with a lot of very interesting distractions…) is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/158806

23kidzdoc
Jul 3, 2021, 10:15 am

>14 LolaWalser: De nada e obrigado (you're welcome and thanks), Lola! I am completely unfamiliar with Luis Bernardo Honwana and We Killed Mangy Dog and Other Stories, so I look forward to your review of that book. I looked at Honwana's Wikipedia page, and noticed that this book was listed as one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in 2002. Several other books by Lusophone authors also made the list:

Creative Writing:

The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo, Germano Almeida (Cabo Verde) (I'm currently reading this novel)
Sleepwalking Land, Mia Couto (Mozambique)
Karingana ua Karingana, José Craveirinha (Mozambique)
We Killed Mangy Dog and Other Stories, Luis Bernardo Honwana (Mozambique)
Ualalapi, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa (Mozambique) (I read it earlier this year)
A Geração da Utopia, Pepetela (Angola)
Nós os do Makulusu, José Luandino Vieira (Angola)

Scholarship/Nonfiction:

Os nacionalismos africanos, Mario de Andrade (Angola)
Unity and Struggle, Amílcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau)
The Struggle for Mozambique, Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique)

I also own two books by Eça de Queirós, The Crime of Father Amaro and The Maias, although I don't expect to get to either book this quarter. I do hope to get to at least one Brazilian novel, And Still the Earth by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, and I need to look through my stacks for other Brazilian works, including ones that I've already read.

>15 thorold: You're welcome, Mark. I thought I owned a copy of The Lusiads, but it isn't in my LT library. There is a high likelihood that I'll read some novels by Portuguese authors, especially if I'm able to travel to Lisbon in September; The Book of Disquiet, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, and The Three Marias would be the books that I would most likely bring with me. It would, of course, be perfect to read The Book of Disquiet outside of Café a Brasileira close to the statue of Fernando Pessoa while enjoying um bica.



Café a Brasileira is within a stone's throw of Baixa-Chiado station of the Metropolitano de Lisboa (Lisbon Metro), and a very short walk from the Livraria Bertrand, the oldest continuously operating bookshop in the world. The original bookshop was located on the Rua Direita do Loreto in the Chiado neighborhood, but the building was destroyed during the devastating 1755 earthquake. Jean Joseph Bertrand relocated the books he could salvage to the Capela de Nossa Senhora das Necessidades (Convent of Our Lady of Needs), one of the few large buildings to survive the earthquake, and moved it back to its current location on the Rua Garrett in 1773, after the Chiado neighborhood was rebuilt.



I'm impressed that you're able to read in Portuguese, as well as other languages. If I do decide to retire in Portugal I'll take a course in Intensive Portuguese, probably next June, and hopefully within a year or two after that I'll be able to start reading Lusophone literature in the original language.

>17 MissWatson: You're welcome, Birgit. Yes, The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmão is available in English translation, and the Kindle version of it only costs $5.99 in the US.

24kidzdoc
Jul 3, 2021, 10:39 am

>19 ELiz_M: Thanks for mentioning those other Angolan authors, Liz!

I read and reviewed Dumba Nengue earlier this year for the first quarter Reading Globally theme, along with Ualalapi. I look forward to your thoughts about it.

>20 SassyLassy: Thanks, Sassy. I finished The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto last week and I loved it; I'll write a review of it this weekend. I also greatly enjoyed The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, which I also gave 4½ stars when I read it years ago. I definitely want to read more of her works.

>21 HumphryClinker: You're welcome, Humphry. That's a great reading list you have for this theme. I read The First Wife by Paulina Chiziane last year (two years ago?) but didn't write a review of it at that time; I did like it, though.

>22 thorold: Thanks, Mark!

25SassyLassy
Jul 3, 2021, 12:25 pm

>22 thorold: Thanks for that - still having trouble with it so have just used the actual post addresses, and added doc's thread on the Iberian Peninsula for Portuguese references.

26kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 5, 2021, 7:35 pm

CABO VERDE (CAPE VERDE)

Book #28: The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida

  

My rating:

The recently deceased Napumoceno da Silva Araújo was widely regarded as a pillar of the business community in the port city of Mindelo on the island of São Vicente, as he was perceived to be a self made man who emigrated to the city from the nearby island of São Nicolau as a poor orphaned boy with a few escudos to his name, but died a wealthy man who owned one of the largest and most successful trading companies in Cabo Verde. He was known to be a modest lifelong bachelor with no love interests who generously donated to the poorer residents of São Vicente, was free from corruption or excessive ambition, and kept mainly to himself, with few friends or visitors to his hilltop home.

In keeping with the law his last will and testament, numbering 387 pages, was read in the presence of a notary and witnesses who knew Senhor da Silva Araújo, including two acquaintances and his nephew Carlos, a driven and unscrupulous young man who stood to inherit everything as the only surviving relative, even though he openly mocked and privately despised his aged uncle. To everyone's surprise, Araújo left nearly all of his wealth to a young woman, Maria de Graça, whom he named as his daughter, and Carlos was only given a small piece of property.

As the testament is read the details of Araújo's secret life are slowly revealed, including Maria de Graça's conception, his other trysts, and the true love of his life, Adélia, who is known to no one. Maria de Graça takes it upon herself to find out who Adélia is, and to learn more about her father, who she believed to be only a godfather until his death.

The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo is set around the time of Cabo Verde's independence from Portugal in 1975, and it provides an interesting view of life in Cabo Verde, on the island of São Vicente, and in the port city of Mindelo, which grew rapidly due to the influx of immigrants from other Cabo Verdean islands due to famine in the 1940s and 1950s, and was unique in terms of its ethnic diversity and lack of established hierarchy and political structure.

Germano Almeida (1945-) is one of Cabo Verde's most celebrated authors, who was awarded the Camões Prize in 2018, the most prestigious literary award in the Lusophone world, which is given annually to an author of an outstanding oeuvre of work written in Portuguese. He received a law degree from the University of Lisbon, and he continues to write prolifically and practice law in Mindelo. The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo was chosen as one of Africa's best 100 books of the 20th century during the 2002 Zimbabwe Book Fair, the only book by a Cabo Verdean author on that list.

27SassyLassy
Jul 5, 2021, 12:31 pm

>26 kidzdoc: I like the sound of that one. Noted.

28thorold
Jul 7, 2021, 11:22 am

This is a book I was planning to read for the Southern Africa theme last summer, but didn't quite get to.

Terra sonâmbula (1992; Sleepwalking land) by Mia Couto (Mozambique, 1955- )

  

In a war-devastated landscape, an old man and a boy set up camp provisionally in a burnt-out bus. There they find a suitcase containing a stack of notebooks, the story of a young man called Kindzu, who has set out to find his father, lost at sea in the aftermath of the war. The two stories carry on in parallel, punctuated by encounters with one-eyed giants, sorceresses, beaches and all that kind of thing.

There's a lot of Homer going on here, and a certain amount of Ovid, but it's Homer and Ovid as they might have written if they'd grown up in the Southern Hemisphere and known about Samuel Beckett and Gabriel García Márquez. And it's all going on in a very distinctively African way, which feels coherent and enjoyably puzzling, not at all like a literary exercise. Couto draws us into the terror of living in that kind of war-destroyed world, where there are no longer any certainties you can count on, and the best you can do is try to retain some shreds of human dignity. Even when all quests ultimately fail and promises can't be kept, Couto wants us to see that the attempt to live like a human being and not like a beast is already a blow against the negative forces of the war.

29kidzdoc
Jul 7, 2021, 11:42 am

>28 thorold: it's Homer and Ovid as they might have written if they'd grown up in the Southern Hemisphere and known about Samuel Beckett and Gabriel García Márquez.

That's good enough for me. I've requested Sleepwalking Land from the Atlanta library system, so I'll read it this month or next.

30rocketjk
Jul 8, 2021, 12:46 pm

Wow, Darryl. I'm finally getting to this thread as part of my LT catch up after my vacation. What a lot of great work and information. I don't generally read to these quarterly themes per se, but I do enjoy following others' reading on them. I can say that you've made me want to visit Cabo Verde. I have a couple of compilation CDs of Cabo Verdean music, which is heavenly.

31kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 9, 2021, 12:23 pm

>30 rocketjk: Sounds good, Jerry. Horace Silver's father, John Tavares Silva, was born and lived in Cabo Verde before he emigrated to the United States, and his 1965 album The Cape Verdean Blues is dedicated to his father.

The Cape Verdean Blues (single): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gt7QXwYpZo

32kidzdoc
Jul 9, 2021, 12:23 pm

MOZAMBIQUE/MOÇAMBIQUE

The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto

  

My rating:

Family, school, other people, they all elect some spark of promise in us, some area in which we may shine. Some are born to sing, others to dance, others are born merely to be someone else. I was born to keep quiet. My only vocation is silence. It was my father who explained this to me: I have an inclination to remain speechless, a talent for perfecting silences.

I was eleven years old when I saw a woman for the first time, and I was seized by such sudden surprise that I burst into tears.

Mwanito is an 11 year old boy whose father, Silvestre Vitalício, has taken him and his older brother Ntunzi to live in Jezoosalem, the ruins of an abandoned game preserve in the countryside of Moçambique after the mysterious and sudden death of his beloved wife. Silvestre's brother in law and friend make a community of five, and the domineering Silvestre insists that Jezoosalem is the last remaining civilized place on Earth. He loves his sons, especially Mwanito, whose gift as a "tuner of silences" helps mitigate Silvestre's tortured mind and most violent instincts, especially towards his rebellious older son, who rejects his father's incredulous claims and beliefs.

Life in Jezoosalem is suddenly transformed by the appearance of Marta, a Portuguese woman who befriends Mwanito and sets Ntunzi's hormones raging, but she is a dire threat to Silvestre and what he has taught his sons. Tension steadily builds in the altered community, and the increasingly unstable Silvestre boldly vows to remove the stranger by force if she does not leave willingly.

The Tuner of Silences is a lyrical, captivating and unforgettable novel filled with damaged souls who struggle to find meaning and happiness in lives permanently altered by the deaths of those they love the most. Mia Couto is one of Africa's most celebrated contemporary writers, and after reading The Tuner of Silences, one of my favorite novels of 2021 to date, it is easy to see why.

33kidzdoc
Jul 9, 2021, 1:08 pm

SÃO TOMÉ AND PRÍNCIPE

Native Dance: An African Story by Gervásio Kaiser
The Moor of Sankoré: A Short Story by Gervásio Kaiser

    

Native Dance and The Moor of Sankoré are two very brief and even more forgettable short stories by Gervásio Kaiser, one of the few authors from São Tomé and Príncipe whose work has been translated into English. In Native Dance a man is arrested and falsely charged with throwing a knife at a woman after her son beat up a smaller, when in fact he only threw keys to the ground in her direction. After the judge dismisses the case against him he sees the mother of the child he sought to protect, who had rejected his invitations to dance with him in a local club but now welcomes him. The Moor of Sankoré is a recent graduate of the University of Sankoré, an ancient center of learning in Mali, who seeks to take a flight home but encounters multiple obstacles in doing so.

Not recommended.

34kidzdoc
Jul 10, 2021, 9:29 am

ANGOLA

Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki, translated from the Portuguese by Stephen Henighan

  

My rating:

Ndalu, the narrator of this novel, is a schoolboy in Luanda, the capital of Angola, in the spring of 1991, a time in which the country was led by President José Eduardo dos Santos of the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), who rode in public in a bulletproof Mercedes surrounded by heavily armed guards, as the country was in civil war against the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. The MPLA was supported by Cuba and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union, and between 1975 and 1991 400,000 Cubans served as teachers, physicians and soldiers there. UNITA was mainly supported by the United States, especially during President Ronald Reagan's two terms in office, along with the apartheid South African government, as both feared the spread of Marxism to other sub-Saharan countries, including South Africa itself. The MPLA held control of Luanda and the urbanized coastal areas of Angola and were supported by the Mbundu people, whereas UNITA's power was in the north and less populated interior of the country and were favored by the Ovimbundu, Angola's largest ethnic group. Due to the strength of MPLA and the large presence of disciplined Cuban soldiers Luanda at that time was relatively safe especially after 1988, when the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale repelled a South African/UNITA armed invasion, cemented Cuban/MPLA control of the country, and led to the downfall of South African President P.W. Botha. Guerrilla attacks on schools and other establishments was a constant fear, although a questionable reality.

The title of this novel refers to the use of the word comrade to formally address nearly everyone in the MPLA controlled territory; Ndalu's favorite visitor at home is Comrade António, and his primary teachers are Comrade Teacher Maria, the wife of Comrade Teacher Ángel, both from Cuba. Ndalu and his schoolmates are in the last few days of their classes, and are good kids although somewhat rebellious and apt to get into mild trouble, even though they love the school and their teachers, although they find them and other Cubans to be somewhat inscrutable and overly idealistic. Through Ndalu's eyes the reader views the everyday life in Angola in the early 1990s, which is marked with frequent mass rallies, socialist holidays, and speeches at school in opposition to imperialism, Ronald Reagan and apartheid, along with the use of ration cards to purchase goods. Most of Ndalu's classmates and their families are relatively well off in comparison to their Cuban teachers, and they sit alongside each other in an ethnic melting pot of Blacks, mixed race mestiços, and white Cubans and Portuguese.

At the end of the school year the children are saddened to learn that their teachers would soon return to Cuba, leaving their future education in charge of native Angolans. Soon they would learn that a peace agreement between MPLA and UNITA had been reached, and Cuba withdrew its presence from the country. What they could not foresee is that the presidential election held the following year kept President dos Santos and MPLA in power, and led to a vicious resurgence of the Angolan Civil War after Jonas Savimbi and UNITA, who were assured that they would win the election, lost instead.

Good Morning Comrades is a valuable insight into Angola during the end of the Cold War, and what appeared to be the end of the Angolan Civil War, which is mainly drawn from the Ondjaki's own childhood in Luanda. The afterword by the book's translator, Stephen Henighan, provides valuable context to the novel, which is essential for those unfamiliar with the country's history, and his comments bumped my rating of the book from 3½ to 4 stars.

35cindydavid4
Jul 12, 2021, 8:06 pm

wow, forgot to star this! Love how your set this up. Not sure where to start. I knew nothing of the carnation revolution, so perhaps should start there - what novels might be covering that event? Also always wondered about Portugal in the 30s, while spain was going through its civil war, was portugal involved in that at all? Idalso love some travel narratives to these places (translated to English)

36cindydavid4
Editado: Jul 12, 2021, 8:07 pm

double post

37kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 12, 2021, 9:42 pm

>35 cindydavid4: Thanks, Cindy! The Carnation Revolution on 25 April 1974 was a relatively bloodless military coup d'état that overthrew the authoritarian government of Estado Novo led by Prime Minister Marcello Caetano, who replaced the longtime dictator António de Oliveira Salazar after he suffered a stroke in 1968. The Estado Novo became increasingly unpopular amongst the citizens and especially the military in Portugal, due mainly to the campaigns that the Portuguese Army had to engage against revolutionary forces in Portugal's African colonies, especially in Angola and Mozambique. the country's increasing isolation from the United Nations, NATO and the rest of Europe, and the poor living conditions of the Portuguese people relative to their European neighbors. Very few shots were fired on 25 April, only four people were killed that day (which isn't insignificant, but it pales in comparison to the massive loss of life during the Spanish Civil War and the fascist regime under Generalíssimo Francisco Franco), and many civilians put carnations in the muzzles of soldiers' rifles and on their uniforms that day.

Prime Minister Salazar took control of the Portuguese government in 1932, and he clandestinely supported the Nationalist movement led by Franco during the Spanish Civil War, as he supplied the Nationalists with ammunition and logistical resources, while publicly claiming neutrality, as he feared that a democratic government in Spain could adversely impact his own authoritarian regime.

I think I'll have to "phone a friend" to help me find out if there are any novels that cover the Carnation Revolution, and the Estado Novo. One friend that I met during my trip to Lisbon in 2018 lives there, is an avid bibliophile, and operates a Little Free Library near his home in the city. I'm in frequent contact with him, and with DB (deebee1), a former member of Club Read who lives close to Lisbon. I'll reach out to them tomorrow, in order to answer your excellent questions more thoroughly.

You've also reminded me that I never did finish the sections on Brasil and Portugal, as I had promised to do. I'll get to that this week, as I'm off from work until next Monday.

38cindydavid4
Editado: Jul 12, 2021, 10:30 pm

>37 kidzdoc: thanks! eager for what you find out.

Remembering my 5th grade social studies teacher (the one who got me interested in the world) put a plastic sheet over the map of africa so she could mark new countries and their name, circa 1967

39cindydavid4
Jul 12, 2021, 10:31 pm

ignore the first question - you covered that in your history above.

40thorold
Jul 13, 2021, 12:56 am

I don’t know if it really “counts” for the theme, but one of the best books I’ve read about the Salazar era is the historical novel Sostiene Pereira (Pereira Maiantains/Pereira Declares) by the Italian Lusophile Antonio Tabucchi. He was a professor of Portuguese literature in Italy and a celebrated translator of Pessoa, and lived half the year in Lisbon, so he might just about be on-topic.

And definitely on-topic is The year of the death of Ricardo Reis, but that’s not a book you would read to learn about history…

I haven’t read The inquisitors' manual by Portuguese literary heavyweight (and physician) António Lobo Antunes, but that sounds like an interesting novel with a Carnation Revolution background.

41kidzdoc
Jul 13, 2021, 7:17 am

>38 cindydavid4: Yes! I'm eager to find out what Joaquim and DB have to say. I need to touch base with the two of them anyway, as it looks as though I'll be able to visit Lisbon during the last two weeks of September, according to my work group's preliminary work schedule for that month.

>40 thorold: Antonio Tabucchi definitely counts for this theme, for the reasons you mentioned. Pereira Declares is a great novel, which I absolutely loved, and it wouldn't take much to inspire me to read it again.

I had wondered if The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis would be applicable, although it's been many years since I've read it. I own a copy of The Inquisitors' Manual, but I haven't read it yet, so thanks for mentioning it.

Another book I own that I'll have to look at and definitely read this quarter is The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters, which was co-written by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa. It was critical of the Estado Novo, Portuguese colonialism, and misogyny in Portuguese society, and after it was published it was quickly banned by government censors and its authors were arrested and put on trial. These arrests were widely condemned, and protests that followed played a role in the Carnation Revolution and the downfall of Marcelo Caetano's dictatorship.

42kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 13, 2021, 10:39 am

GUINEA-BISSAU

Anos Ku Ta Manda by Yasmina Nuny

  

My rating:

Yasmina Nuny Silva is a Guinea-Bissauan poet, spoken word artist, research consultant and magazine editor who was born in Portugal, lived in several African countries, received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Birmingham (UK), and lives, works and performs there. Anos Ku Ta Manda is her first published book, which is a collection of powerful and touching poems about her homeland, her passionate transatlantic love with her partner, life as a Black woman in Britain and a person of color in these difficult and challenging times.

This poem, titled 'Free', is from the page about her book from Verve Poetry Press (https://vervepoetrypress.com/2019/03/29/yasmina-nuny/?v=7516fd43adaa):

Free

I have loved myself to this
place.
To this state.
Enough to preserve when needed,
cry when needed,
war when needed.
Shave, regrow, rebirth
as needed.
Bloom where it is possible,
learn from all of it.
Unlearn to apologize for it –
for
myself.
We been there already,
done that already.
No longer at peace with disrespecting
God
like that.

I liked this poem, but many of the others in this book were even more powerful. The following is a link to a YouTube video of Nuny reading one of those poems, 'A Word to the Black Girls': https://youtu.be/h3iJR5-xeLo

Anos Ku Ta Manda closes with poems by two rising Black British writers, Darnell Thompson-Gooden, a British man of Jamaican heritage whose 'Poems about her' is a moving tribute to a former girlfriend and how she enriched his life, and Ayò, a Nigerian-born poet and medical student, whose poem 'I've Lost My Tongue Help me!', published in Yoruba and English, describes the loss of her mother tongue and her connection to her homeland.

I look forward to reading more of Yasmina Nuny's work, and seeing more of her spoken word performances online or in person. You can read more about her on her web page, https://www.yasminanuny.com.

43kidzdoc
Jul 13, 2021, 2:13 pm

>35 cindydavid4: I forgot to mention one travel narrative I own that I may bring with me to Lisbon in September is Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture by José Saramago, in which the author travels by car throughout the country, visiting mainly smaller towns and cities in the interior of Portugal.

44cindydavid4
Editado: Jul 13, 2021, 2:23 pm

>43 kidzdoc: oh my goodness I have that book! Found it in a bookstore as I was traveling, read a little bit then got distracted I need to dig that out and try again!!!

ETA just found it! This will be one of my reads for this quarter/ Just need to finish a couple of books first!

45kidzdoc
Jul 13, 2021, 2:19 pm

>44 cindydavid4: Excellent!

46cindydavid4
Jul 13, 2021, 2:32 pm

I do love Saramago, probably my favorite book is The Gospel According to Jesus Christ This is not for everyone, some people may feel offended by his ideas, but I thought an excellent twist to the story. Definietly want to read more of him

47cindydavid4
Editado: Jul 13, 2021, 2:36 pm

Este mensaje fue borrado por su autor.

48kidzdoc
Jul 13, 2021, 2:36 pm

Yes. Saramago was one of my two most favorite authors when he was alive, along with Mario Vargas Llosa. I also enjoyed The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, but my favorite books by him where Blindness and The Stone Raft.

49cindydavid4
Jul 13, 2021, 2:39 pm

Ive read Blindness and Seeing, had not heard ot Stone Raft but that looks really interesting. You had mentioned The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis earlier that I want to read.

50kidzdoc
Jul 13, 2021, 3:14 pm

Yes, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is also superb. I'll definitely reread it, but probably not this quarter.

51thorold
Editado: Jul 15, 2021, 7:22 am

Darryl mentioned Paulina Chiziane above — he was very enthusiastic about this book when we did the Southern Africa theme last year and I put it on the mental TBR list. This theme has given me the nudge to get to it. Since the ebook was available in the original Portuguese, it was another good opportunity to practice the language, even if it took a bit longer to read as a result:

Niketche : uma história de poligamia : romance (2002; The first wife: a tale of polygamy) by Paulina Chiziane (Mozambique, 1955- )

  

Rami is a very ordinary 21st century middle-aged, middle-class housewife: convent-educated, with five kids, a nice house in Maputo, and a husband, Tony, who has made a very successful career in the police force. But she isn't happy: Tony has been neglecting her somewhat, and often only seems to be using the family home as a place to take baths and change his clothes. Women-friends advise her to win her husband back by taking courses in erotic practices or by consulting witches, but that doesn't get her anywhere. When she investigates where Tony is actually spending his time, she's alarmed to discover that as well as his legal household with her, he has been maintaining four other unofficial wives scattered around the city, each with a house and children.

Chiziane follows Rami through the process of developing a conscious understanding of the role she and her "rivals" have been manipulated into playing in Mozambican society, where there is a gender-imbalance caused by war and migration, as well as complicated intersections of traditional Bantu culture and colonialist Catholic ideas under a surface coating of FRELIMO Marxism, and the other, older, set of collisions between the largely matriarchal traditions in the north of the country and the more patriarchal culture of the south.

Rami gets together with the other women to take control of their own lives, gaining economic independence with the help of a mutual microcredit scheme and gradually manoeuvring Tony into a position where he becomes aware of the harm he has done through his irresponsible actions and his reliance on the principle of male infallibility.

There's a lot of politics and sociology to get through here, but it's presented very lightly, in the framework of a story that is effectively a romantic comedy, albeit one that doesn't try to conceal the very real oppression and suffering that is going on as a result of the way women are treated in contemporary African society. Chiziane is extremely good at what she does, there are lively characters who never descend into stereotypes, there is clever, funny dialogue, and there are some glorious angry rants and poetic excursions — altogether a very interesting and enjoyable book.

52kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 15, 2021, 7:42 am

Great review of The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy. Mark! I was considering rereading and reviewing it for this theme, but because I agree completely with your assessment of it I probably won't do so. (Thanks!) It was published as a paperback and an e-book by Archipelago Books, a superb publisher of literature in translation based in Brooklyn that I subscribe to. Several years ago I visited the flagship Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London, and noticed a rack which displayed nothing but Archipelago titles, so I would assume that it's available in Europe, though probably not easily. I just looked at Amazon UK, and unfortunately I don't see a Kindle version of it for UK; it is available in the US, though.

ETA: Yikes; I'm losing it. I reviewed this book last year.

53thorold
Jul 15, 2021, 9:33 am

>52 kidzdoc: Yikes — I know the feeling! :-)

54kidzdoc
Editado: Jul 15, 2021, 3:00 pm

Cape Verdean Blues by Shauna Barbosa



My rating:

Shauna Barbosa was born in Boston to an Cape Verdean father and an African American mother. She received her MFA at Bennington College in Vermont, and currently teaches in the Writers' Workshop at UCLA Extension. Her poems have been published by numerous sources over the past decade, and her first collection of poems, Cape Verdean Blues was released by Pitt Poetry Press in 2018, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Voices Award the following year.

Cape Verdean Blues is named for the 1966 album The Cape Verdean Blues by the famed jazz pianist Horace Silver, which itself was composed in honor of Silver's Cape Verdean father John Tavares Silva. This book similarly honors her father's homeland, along with her personal life and loves, the lives of working class people of Cape Verdean descent whom she encounters, and the beauty of that lush country.

One of my favorite poems in this collection honors the late Cape Verdean morna singer Cesária Évora, which is available on her website, https://www.shaunabarbosa.com/:

To the Brothers of Cesária Évora

I’m at the jazz bar
staring at the saxophonist
looking for the entry wound.
My curated movements
are all pretend

darkness don’t equal depth.
He’s looking for mind, too.
Me too is not the same
as hang in there. All rhythm
no blue like swinging

arms are all form of measurement.
The sax to body position, dead skin
cells to household dust

flying across the world
doesn’t compare to noticing
your only bookmark is a pair
of scissors, to cut

means leaving the big tune.
No more pretend this place
smells how it looks outside
at dawn on September’s first
fresh

turning from hopeful to who
can I talk to alive or six-feet under.
Curated sendoff,

one last wound tune
for my brothers, all colors ranging
bread, coffee, blood sausage, and
gaslight. No one wants
a black mouth brother

I know, you don’t want to be
cause it’s difficult to be
black, and
brown mouth with a hopeful open
no more pretend not knowing
that speaking Portuguese
at the traffic stop
won’t save you.
________________________

The poems, like Cape Verde itself, are quite lyrical in their use of language, but unfortunately I did not fully connect with many of them on a first or second reading. As a result, I've given Cape Verdean Blues a 3½ star rating for now, but I'll return to this collection and possibly increase my rating after I give her work another try.

55LolaWalser
Jul 15, 2021, 6:24 pm

 

We killed Mangy-Dog, Luis Bernardo Honwana, OPD 1969

This collection of seven stories by the Mozambican author (and journalist, and politician) Luis Bernardo Honwana was the first instance of a book-length work by an African Lusophone writer published in English, and for a long time one of only few literary treatments of Mozambique available in general.

Honwana was a fighter for Mozambique's independence from Portugal and as such imprisoned for several years. All the stories in the collection deal more or less overtly with the legacy of colonialism but each is different in tone and style, transcending the exigencies of "mere" propaganda. The title story focusses the misery of the people through the fate of an old dog covered with sores who the bosses decide to kill. The dog's only defender is a "crazy" girl, until a boy comes to identify with the dog too--but two black children stand no chance against the weapons of the masters.

The stark realism of this story is Honwana's favoured register, but he can also unexpectedly deploy truly beautiful lyricism, as in Nhinguitimo, where a violent storm foreshadows upheaval of another kind, or a meditative calm as in Inventory of furniture & effects, like a Vermeer in words. Highly recommended.

56kidzdoc
Jul 15, 2021, 8:55 pm

Great review of We Killed Mangy Dog, Lola. I'll be on the lookout for it.

57thorold
Jul 17, 2021, 8:49 am

>34 kidzdoc: Ondjaki’s book Transparent city features in the Guardian’s selection of “International authors to read this summer” today:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/17/going-places-the-international-aut...

58kidzdoc
Jul 17, 2021, 11:56 am

>57 thorold: Nice! Thanks for mentioning that, Mark. I'll probably read Transparent City, which I have on my Kindle, next month.

I picked up a copy of Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto from the library today, and I'll probably read it in August as well.

I made hotel and flight reservations for Lisbon for the last two weeks of September. I'll bring at least a couple of classic novels based in the city with me, The History of the Siege of Lisbon by José Saramago, and The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, to read while I'm there. I'll pay a visit to Livraria Bertrand, the oldest continuously operating bookshop in the world, shortly after I arrive, to see what other enticing Lusophone novels translated into English that I can pick up.

59LolaWalser
Jul 17, 2021, 3:17 pm

>56 kidzdoc:

Thanks. May be interesting to some, when I was searching for a photo I came across this page with one whole story from the book, The Hands of the Blacks (As mãos dos pretos). I suspect it gets assigned in school a lot, it's particularly short and straightforward. Just a little scroll under the bio.

https://www.revuenoire.com/en/luis-bernardo-honwana-mozambique/

60kidzdoc
Jul 17, 2021, 3:50 pm

>59 LolaWalser: Thanks, Lola! I'll read As mãos dos pretos soon.

61thorold
Jul 18, 2021, 1:20 pm

Two translations of Portuguese books from the pile:

The lives of things : short stories (1978; English 2012) by José Saramago (Portugal, 1922-2010) translated by Giovanni Pontiero
  

Six short pieces in the classic Saramago mode, dominated by the opening story, "The Chair", a heavily-ironic woodworm's eye view of the death of an unnamed, elderly dictator (presumably Salazar) fatally injured when a chair collapses under him. "Reflux" and "Things" are both allegorical fantasies, one about a king allergic to the sight of death and another about a dystopia in which inanimate objects rise in revolution against the men who are prepared to treat their fellow men as inanimate objects. "Embargo" is a twisted look at the oil crisis and car-dependance, and "The centaur" explores what the world looks like to the last surviving horse/man — Saramago is surely the first person to ask himself how a centaur could turn over in bed...

The book of disquiet (1982) by Fernando Pessoa (Portugal, 1888-1935), translated by Margaret Jull Costa
  

A collection of short prose pieces — a kind of diary — from the thirties, which Pessoa attributes to one of his heteronyms, "Bernardo Soares", supposedly a somewhat antisocial, depressed bookkeeper in an import/export business in Lisbon's Baixa. Soares reflects paradoxically on the benefits of not engaging with real life, social interactions, love, travel, the literary world, and all the rest: he steadfastly maintains that it's far more satisfying to live your life in dreams and imagination; better to have boredom to dream about escaping from than to achieve something that leaves you disappointed. Rather a negative position, but Soares argues it with a great deal of humour and irony, and this is a book with a quotable sentence or two on every page. Indeed, its supreme quotability is perhaps what undermines it a bit: it can feel at times as though you are reading a tear-off calendar. The solution seems to be to take it slowly, almost as if it were actually a calendar.

Like much of Pessoa's work, this was published posthumously, so there are a lot of arguments about which parts really belong to the book, which are meant to be by Soares and which by Pessoa, and so on, and various rival English translations based on different editions of the original text. You can have endless fun with that, if you want...

62LolaWalser
Jul 18, 2021, 1:37 pm

Saramago is surely the first person to ask himself how a centaur could turn over in bed...

Ha, could be. Curiously, there's Moacyr Scliar's The Centaur in the Garden (O Centauro no Jardim), in which very many questions of the sort get raised.

Incidentally, Scliar may be an interesting choice for a Brazilian author, he was also Jewish (and in fact it's generally taken that his centaur is externalising Jewishness in a way).

63LolaWalser
Editado: Jul 18, 2021, 1:43 pm

(sorry, double post!)

64thorold
Jul 18, 2021, 1:40 pm

>62 LolaWalser: Sounds interesting!

65SassyLassy
Jul 31, 2021, 5:50 pm

BRAZIL



An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector (Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector) translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler 2021
first published as Uma Aprendizagm ou O Livro dos Prazeres in 1969

What to make of a book that begins with a comma and ends with a colon? Is it a meditation, an interrupted narrative, a lengthy stream of consciousness perhaps? Lispector uses all these techniques. Her skill is such that she is able to not only use them singly, but frequently all at the same time.

Lóri, the protagonist, has a "condition", one that is at first unclear. It could be physical; it could be psychological. It is actually both, but Lóri has rolled them together. Ulisses, her suitor in this still platonic relationship, is able to separate them out. Regarding her limp, her tells her The condition can't be cured but the fear of the condition is curable.

The psychological condition he regards as curable, but this can only be done by Lóri, from within. Psychic pain pervades her life; to avoid it she has removed herself from emotional life. As she put it to Ulisses, I'm an insurmountable mountain along my own path.

Although Lóri often seems lost, this is actually a battle of control. Ulisses has told her they will not become lovers until she overcomes her self-doubt, her fear of life, and not only becomes acquainted with herself, but knows herself. Lóri has demanded nothing in return, passively accepting these conditions, yet paradoxically she is in control. Ulisses has said he will wait for her. The timing is all hers. This puts Ulisses in a position of passively waiting for Lóri to come to him, while at the same time allowing Lóri to tease Ulisses with each psychological breakthrough.

Lispector produces a real tension here as the reader wonders with Lóri whether she will be able to achieve self-realization. However, the idea that this process was an apprenticeship, with the goal to earn Ulisses, rather than to know herself for herself, was difficult. The novel is told from Lóri's point of view. Lispector charts her discoveries in a series of what could be called progressive ellipses. She makes some progress, regresses a bit, incorporates new ideas, and moves a bit further forward, while the language circles around on itself.

We know very little about Ulisses, other than the fact that he is a philosophy professor. Why is he worth this inner struggle and turmoil? Why does he put up with Lóri bowing out time after time?

A brief note by Lispector before the novel begins may give a clue. She says, This book demanded a greater liberty that I was afraid to give. It is far above me... She has said of it elsewhere I humanized myself. Lispector, whom the Guardian has called "One of the very great writers of the last century", was a mystic. Much of Lóri's quest involves the presence she calls 'the God', an entity she struggled to comprehend. She realized though "Not understanding" was so vast that it surpassed all understanding - understanding was always limited. But not-understanding had no frontiers and led to the infinite, to the God. This made it easier. Later she discovered Because it's in the Impossible that you find reality. Perhaps Lispector's message is that the apprenticeship is life itself; to arrive at complete self knowledge would leave nothing.

_________________

From The New York Times Overlooked obituaries series

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/obituaries/clarice-lispector-overlooked.html

66thorold
Ago 2, 2021, 6:50 am

The Guardian today has a feature review of the new biography of Pessoa by Richard Zenith (It seems to be Pessoa: a biography in the US and Pessoa: an experimental life in the UK).

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/02/pessoa-an-experimental-life-review...

67Hebor_47294
Ago 2, 2021, 7:05 am

Este usuario ha sido eliminado por spam.

68Hebor_47294
Ago 2, 2021, 7:06 am

Este usuario ha sido eliminado por spam.

69kidzdoc
Ago 7, 2021, 6:31 am

I purchased Pessoa: A Biography last week. I plan to read it starting next month, and I hope to finish it before I leave for Lisbon on the 14th of September.

70thorold
Ago 8, 2021, 11:03 am

>69 kidzdoc: Will you have to pay excess baggage to transport it to Portugal, or are you sending it ahead by steamship? I thought it sounded interesting until I saw that it's over 1000 pages long.

--

Another little pile of books, including a few for this theme, arrived the other day. A short one from the top of the pile:

La œdécouverte de l'Amérique par les Turcs ou Comment l'Arabe Jamil Bichara, défricheur de terres vierges, venu en la bonne ville d'Itabuna pour satisfaire aux nécessités du corps, s'y vit offrir fortune et mariage ou encore Les fiançailles d'Adma: mini-roman (1994; The discovery of America by the Turks) by Jorge Amado (Brazil, 1912-2001), translated from Portuguese to French by Jean Orecchioni

  

A late novella, written as a tie-in with the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of China Hispaniola. Amado reasons that if Columbus could be said to have "discovered America", the same thing could just as well be said of two Ottoman opportunists who happened to arrive in Bahia on the same immigrant ship in 1903. Raduan becomes a professional poker-player, Jamil a shopkeeper, and there's a comic plot of Raduan trying to marry Jamil off to Adma, fearsome daughter of Ibrahim, proprietor of the Bon Marché drapery.

Amado uses a deceptively simple kind of Arabian Nights narrative style to tell the story, but it's all heavily loaded with irony. If it's a rehash of The taming of the shrew then it's one in which the men are shown to be just as shallow and selfish as the women. Ibrahim's chief motivation for marrying off his daughter is to obtain the freedom to go fishing in the mornings again: he apparently sees nothing odd about canvassing a possible suitor for her hand during a party at the local brothel. Amado's narrator seems to be on the side of the men in the battle, but it's not at all clear that the reader is expected to agree with that.

71kidzdoc
Ago 15, 2021, 11:27 am

>70 thorold: Ha! I may need to purchase seats for Pessoa: A Biography on the Delta flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam and the KLM flight from Amsterdam to Lisbon next month. I had faint hope of finishing it before I leave on the 14th, but, given how busy the hospital service is there is absolutely no chance of that happening.

72SassyLassy
Ago 17, 2021, 8:44 am

PORTUGAL



All the Names
by José Saramago translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa 1999
first published as Todes os Nomes

We've all encountered Senhor José, some of us may even know him; a man so inconsequential he has no family name. Names are his life though, for Senhor José toils five and a half days a week at the Central Registry for Births, Marriages, and Deaths, the place where all life's milestones have been recorded painstakingly on file cards by hand since time immemorial. Divorces are recorded now too in this secular age, but the institutional name remains.

Senhor José's leisure time is spent augmenting the histories of those he feels may become famous. To do this, he surreptitiously brings home records from the Central Registry and copies them onto purloined official forms, then augments these files with newspaper and magazine clippings; a harmless enough activity, but not sanctioned.

His home is little more than a stable attached to the great building. This means he can secretly enter and exit at night through a forgotten connecting door. Each morning, however, he must line up on the front steps with all the other workers, who enter by seniority with the Registrar last of all.

One day Senhor José found an ordinary woman's file card accidentally picked up with those of his chosen subjects. He made the daring decision to find out all he could about her. Once launched on this quest, José became more and more daring. He asked for a half hour off one day, his first such request in twenty-five years of working at the Registry. He created a masterful forgery, a letter identifying him and requiring all he questioned to aid him. He stumbled along, always terrified of getting caught, yet going deeper and deeper down his rabbit hole. As he went, this friendless man learned to speak with others, to realize there were areas of chaos in the world. Each night, after writing his findings in a journal, he discussed them with the ceiling above his bed, and pondered the replies.

Anyone who's ever worked in a bureaucracy will recognize the sheer silliness of so much in Senhor José's work world. Every couple of years, The Registry buillt out a new rear wall to accommodate the ever increasing number of file cards for the deceased. Should these be arranged with the most recent dead in front, as these are the cards most likely to be needed; or should they be arranged with the earlier dead in front so that the files don't all need to be moved back with each extension?

Saramago writes with a real fondness for Senhor José, an Everyman of the office. Who else could create such a delightful book around such a character, and successfully liberate him?

73cindydavid4
Sep 8, 2021, 10:49 am

Oh I had meant to get this for the theme. Great review, thanks for the reminder!

74MissWatson
Sep 28, 2021, 4:22 am

Well, on the third attempt I managed to finish Der große Augenblick by Clarice Lispector, and I am not sure what to make of it, to be honest. I am not that interested in writing as a process...
And why is September almost gone already? I had plans!

75MissWatson
Sep 28, 2021, 4:23 am

Sorry, accidental double post.

76cindydavid4
Sep 28, 2021, 5:32 am

hee,I know. Soon we'll turn around it will be january! Ive enjoyed reading about the books here. This has been very interesting!

77thorold
Sep 30, 2021, 1:37 pm

AnnieMod will be popping up with the Q4 theme read very soon, but we can keep this thread open for late entries as we always do, of course.

I've still got a couple of Brazilian books to go, but in the meantime here's an oddball entry that caught my eye between the learned books on Camões and Pessoa when I was doing a last-minute scan of the Portuguese Language and Literature section in our local library:

Gods toorn over Nederland (2008; original: A ira de Deus sobre a Holanda) by José Rentes de Carvalho (Portugal, Netherlands, 1930- ), translated from Portuguese to Dutch by Arie Pos

  

The young José Rentes de Carvalho, a political exile from Salazar's Portugal, arrived in the Netherlands in 1956 to do some research for the commercial attaché at the Brazilian embassy, a job he expected to take him a few weeks. One thing led to another, as it often does in such cases, and fifty years later Rentes found himself still living in Amsterdam, after a varied career as journalist, businessman and university teacher. He still writes in Portuguese, though. After the revolution he started to be able to publish his novels and non-fiction in Lisbon (although in practice he seems to be better known in Dutch translation).

This book is partly a look at Dutch life as he has experienced it over the long period he has been here, but it's mostly a kind of self-diagnosis to work out what the condition of being a long-term expat does to the way you see the world. He traces his experience through the familiar stages that start with amused contempt for the strange customs of the host country (especially those surrounding food and drink, hospitality, and sex — all of them very bizarre to a Southern European), progress to a deepening understanding of and admiration for the social and political values that the Dutch pride themselves on, and then eventually descend into a pessimistic awareness that Dutch citizens and their political leaders are just as subject to self-interest, mediocrity, indecisiveness and hypocrisy as everyone else in the world.

Of course, when he's dealing with such a long period of time, Rentes also has to allow for the enormous changes that have taken place in the Netherlands in the period that he's been living here, from a small and very provincial place recovering from the blows of the war to a relatively rich country that sees itself as a global force in politics and business, but which is struggling with the social changes resulting from mass immigration. Rentes looks at some of the big events in that story — Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali — and comes to depressing conclusions about the country's future. Possibly he doesn't allow sufficiently for the other thing that affects most long-term expats: age-related pessimism. As we all know, it's not just our host country that is going down the drain, but our country of origin (all long-term expats will agree that, whichever country they came from, that country is now governed by a bunch of corrupt baboons) and everywhere else too.

Given that I arrived in the Netherlands at the same age as Rentes (but some years later), and have also stuck here for unclear reasons, I found this quite a fascinating read. Ask me in about 25 years if I agree with him...

78kidzdoc
Editado: Sep 30, 2021, 2:25 pm

Thanks to everyone who participated in this quarterly read! I am far from done, as I have plenty of books lined up to read over the next three months (although I look forward to and will participate in Annie's fourth quarter theme). I've just starteed reading Pessoa: A Biography by Richard Zenith, and when I go to Lisbon in three weeks I'll read Zenith's translation of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, along with The History of the Siege of Lisbon by José Saramago, The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters and several other books by Lusophone authors.

79thorold
Oct 5, 2021, 12:37 pm

One of my "left-overs":

This seems to be one of Amado's most famous novels, partly because of the 1976 film version by Bruno Barreto — I've got that lined up to watch on MUBI.

Dona Flor et ses deux maris: Histoire morale, histoire d'amour (1966; Dona Flor and her two husbands) by Jorge Amado (Brazil, 1912-2001) translated from Portuguese to French by Georgette Tavares-Bastos

  

For the first 500 pages or so, this pretends to be a straightforward pastiche of an old-fashioned social-realist novel, the sort of thing Balzac would undoubtedly have written, had he been a hundred years younger and living in Bahia. It's all about the flimsiness of the veneer of respectability that (notionally) separates the ambitious, modern, bourgeois, Catholic residents of Salvador de Bahia from the colourful world of gambling, vice, and traditional religion that surrounds them.

Dona Flor is a respectable, self-made woman, proprietor of a celebrated cookery school for the daughters of the rich, but her first husband, Vadinho, is an irresponsible gambler and a party-animal who can't give her anything but love. When he meets his untimely end whilst dancing in drag at the carnival, Flor follows the advice of her friends and — after the required decent interval — takes the considerate, methodical and ever-so-slightly-boring pharmacist and amateur bassoonist Teodoro as her second husband. Naturally, she still has occasional pangs for her nights of passion with the late Vadinho, and Amado takes shameless advantage of her weakness to play a Latin-American novelist's trump card in the last 150 pages, producing much very entertaining chaos in the process.

This is the sort of book where you feel you must be missing out on a lot of in-jokes at the expense of Amado's friends and neighbours, but it also sneaks in quite a lot of detailed social analysis of provincial Brazil in the mid-20th century and the changes it was going through. Flor and her friends are women who have been brought up with a very narrow idea of their role in the world, but many of them have found more or less subtle ways to challenge that.

80thorold
Oct 15, 2021, 4:10 am

Another little bit of gap-filling (in Dutch, because libraries...):

Kleine herinneringen (2006; As pequenas memórias / Small memories) by José Saramago (Portugal, 1922-2010) translated from Portuguese to Dutch by Harrie Lemmens

  

Saramago never wrote his big autobiography, the Book of temptations, often mentioned in his other novels. But he did gather the material he had for it together to compile this little book in which he looks back at his childhood, often seeming to be more interested in the process of remembering and the way early memories get confused and distorted in our minds than he is in the actual content of those memories. He's very conscious that, in his eighties, he doesn't have any other witnesses to refer to for most of the things that happened to him as a small child. Several of the anecdotes in the early part of the book are revised later, as he cross-checks them with other information and realises that they couldn't possibly have happened at the time and place he thought they did. And searching the municipal archives in the hope of resolving the puzzle of when exactly his brother Francisco died draws him off on a complete tangent that resulted in the novel All the names...

But you can also read this as simply a charming, slightly ironic account of growing up in the 1920s in Lisbon and in rural Ribatejo (where his grandparents still lived). There is plenty about poverty, family quarrels, neighbours, school, precocious sexual experimentation, expeditions into the woods, cinema, how he got his (pen-)name, and all the rest of it. Very enjoyable.

The Dutch translation comes with a useful afterword by the translator Harrie Lemmens, summarising Saramago's career after the age of fourteen and taking us through most of his novels.