Today I finished A General Theory of Oblivion from José Eduardo Agualusa which is based on a true story. The book plays at the time when Angola got independent and the main character is a woman who after loosing her relatives decides to build a wall to her apartment in Luanda where she baricades herself from the outside world for decades.
One story line is the one of this woman's the others are of other people in the country showing their lives before and after independence. For short times because of Angola's Portugal past we jump back to Lisbon or other places in Europe but then quickly everything continues in the African continent.
The scene is a post-colonist African country but stories of changes in politics and society tell much more in general about power and people than the original context. It shows how liberators become opressors, how every sysytem becomes its own victim in the end and how the only power we have as people is the one over our own life by trying to live it as freely ans bravely we can.
The book is available also in e-book format in Portugese and English.
An excerpt from the book:
"God weighs souls on a pair of scales. In one of the dishes is the soul, and in the other, the tears of those who weep for it. If nobody cries, the soul goes down to Hell. If there are enough tears, and they are sufficiently heartfelt, it rises up to Heaven. Ludo believed this. Or wanted to believe this. That was what she told Sabalu:
‘People who are missed by other people, they are the ones who go to Paradise. Paradise is the space we occupy in other people’s hearts. That’s what my grandmother used to tell me. I don’t believe it. I’d like to believe in anything that’s so simple — but I lack faith.’Monte had people to cry for him. I find it hard to imagine him in Paradise. Perhaps, however, he’s being purged in some obscure nook of immensity, between the serene splendour of Heaven and the twisted darkness of Hell, playing chess with the angels who are guarding him. If the angels know how to play, if they play well, this would be almost Paradise to him.
As for Horácio Capitão, old Didn’t-I-Tell-You, he spends his afternoons in a rundown bar on Ilha, drinking beer and arguing about politics, in the company of the poet Vitorino Gavião, Artur Quevedo, and another two or three aged cadavers from the old days. To this day he doesn’t recognise Angola’s Independence. He believes that just as communism ended, so one day Independence will end, too. He still breeds pigeons."
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