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BOOK REVIEW: Not so oblivious of her world

Saturday December 09 2017
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A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, a Portuguese journalist born in Angola. PHOTOS | INTERNET SOURCES

By KARI MUTU

In colonial Angola, there was a woman in the city of Luanda who had lived shut up in her home for almost 30 years.

She recorded her life and the transformation happening around her in notebooks, poems and sketches on the walls. This real story was the inspiration for the fictional novel, A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa, a Portuguese journalist born in Angola.

Ludovica is a Portuguese woman living with her sister Odete and her Angolan brother-in-law Orlando in Luanda during the heady days before Independence in 1975.

She’s had traumatic youth and suffers from agoraphobia — the fear of open spaces — since childhood, and so rarely goes outdoors.

One evening, Odete and Orlando go off to a party and disappear in unclear circumstances.

A fearful Ludovica locks herself up in the 11th floor flat and cuts off all contact with other people. Her only companions are a pet dog and a visiting monkey.

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She grows vegetables on a roof garden, listens to the radio, reads voraciously, and reflects on life by writing earnest poems on the apartment walls, poem that Agualusa inserts in between the chapters.

For three decades she lives in oblivion until an orphaned street boy called Sabalu finds his way into her cloistered life.

Like the book’s title, the short chapters start off with intriguing headers such as 'Our Sky is your Floor' and 'Che Guervara’s Mulemba Tree'. The story sweeps through the history of Angola from colonial rule to civil war and into peaceful times.

Agualusa initially intended this story for a theatre script and there are fascinating props of homing pigeons carrying secret messages, a pygmy hippo and a stash of stolen diamonds.

Agualusa has brought together colourful collection of African and European characters including a mute mercenary, a French journalist who loves to investigate disappearances, a government agent turned private detective and nomadic shepherds. You need to keep track of the many personalities that pop up as they later become significant to Ludovica’s incarceration and liberation.

This is an uncomplicated and often humorous novel that moves along energetically, the type of book you can complete in one sitting. Like a notebook of journal entries, the story is a collage of seemingly unrelated people and events in Angola and Portugal.

The writing style can be disconcerting to readers who prefer a linear narrative where each key character is fully formed. But after a few chapters of fragmented tales, I found myself enjoying an unusual literary ride where everything comes together in the end.

The book is an English translation from Portuguese but I did not feel as though the story’s flow or message suffered in the process. Agualusa does not go into much political intensity or intellectual discourse but you sense the brutality of a country at war with itself.

If you are not familiar with Angola’s history, you can feel out of depth trying to follow what is happening outside Ludovica’s apartment and the backstories of the different characters. Nevertheless, it has made me want to read more stories set in Angola.

A General Theory of Oblivion won the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 euros and had earlier been shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.

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