José Eduardo Agualusa – författare

Vinnare av Dublin Literary Award 2017 Samma kväll som Angola utropar sin självständighet tar Ludo det drastiska beslutet att mura in sig i sin lägenhet.Där blir ho kvar i nästan 30 år. Hon överlever på grönsaker hon odlar och en och annan duva som hon lyckas fånga. När det blir kallt eldar hon upp sina möbler och böcker. Men en dag bryts hennes isolering av gatpojken Sabulu, som lyckas klättra tio våningar upp till terrassen. Det blir början på Ludos väg tillbaka till livet. En allmän teori om glömsa är uppbyggd som ett intrikat lapptäcke av röster. Mysteriet kring Ludos märkliga beslut är avslöjas gradvis och händelseförloppet rullas upp utan kronologisk ordning. Resultaten är en fascinerande och lekfull roman, både komisk och tragisk och på samma gång en ömsint skildring av människans sårbarhet. José Eduardo Agualusa är född 1960 och anses vara en av de främsta litterära rösterna från Angola och den portugisiskspråkiga världen. Hans romaner har belönats med en rad priser. En allmän teori om glömska nominerades till International Man Booker Prize 2016. En allmän teori om glömska är en roman om livet och döden men även om godheten och ondskan. Med den har Agualusa ännu en gång lagt en mosaik med lysande skärvor i olika färger. Han är verkligen en annorlunda röst med ett alldeles eget tonfall. Östgöta Correspondenten

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2017A finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 The brilliant new novel from the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home. The outside world slowly seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird’s foot. Until one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace.

José Eduardo Agualusa is the kind of man who asks Siri if she believes in God and connects her second response (because why would you accept the first?) to a question he is asked about which Portuguese is his Portuguese. This capacity for weaving seemingly disparate threads into fascinating texts lies at the heart of Agualusa’s work as both journalist and novelist. In Paradise and Other Hells, we see both sides come together, humanised further by touches of the mundane: a father marvelling at the wonder of his daughter’s hair, the absolute logic of his son’s naïveté; an older man musing about ageing and funerals.Whether riffing on Jorge Luis Borges and his relationship with time, dissecting the political landscape of Angola, unpacking Fernando Pessoa’s casual racism, reflecting on the theory of dreams; or in awe at the beauty of Mozambique Island (where he lives), examining the influence of Africa and Brazil on contemporary Portuguese language, this is a book that reveals a mind constantly at work, a pen always at play with language, and it fizzes with Agualusa’s trademark humour and proboscis-sharp observation.Blending excerpts from his diary with columns published in the press, this is an intricate book that still allows for stop-start reading. In the short article, God is Sick, José Eduardo Agualusa asserts that ”people who are sure that their beliefs are based in good sense are open to discussion. They put forth arguments. They defend a certain line of thinking...” That is precisely what Paradise and Other Hells does, it opens a discussion of the world with the world, and that is the secret of its timelessness.Translated from Portuguese by a team of some of the finest contemporary translators — Rahul Bery (David Trueba’s Rolling Fields), Andrew McDougall, Robin Patterson (Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas), Francisco Vilhena (Adelaide Ivanova’s the hammer and other poems) and José Eduardo’s longtime translator, Daniel Hahn, OBE — and written with a convivial spirit, reading this book is akin to sitting next to a sparkling companion at a memorable dinner party, where the meal is secondary to warm, erudite conversation. Paradise and Other Hells is José Eduardo Agualusa as you’ve never read him before.

"The limitless possibilities of fiction are brilliantly utilised . . . Ingenious" Irish Times"Agualusa's funny and lively tale turns increasingly ominous ahead of an explosive conclusion" Guardian***A Financial Times Fiction in Translation Book of the Year 2023***Daniel lives with artist Moira on her native Island of Mozambique. They are awaiting the birth of their child, while also organising the island's first literary festival. But as soon as the first festival guests arrive, the coast is hit by a cyclone.The island is spared, but the bridge to the mainland is left impassable, and telephone and internet connections are severed. The islanders - and the writers who have come for the festival - are cut off from the outside world. Left to their own devices, the authors forge new bonds and make the best of a situation that gets stranger each day. Some believe they're in an intermediate realm, a kind of limbo, and some have no choice but to write, as the boundaries between reality and fiction, past and future, and life and death begin to blur.Where do we go when it's all over? Perhaps to a small island. This is a novel about the nature of life and of time, and the extraordinary power of imagination and the written word, capable of creating anything and regenerating everything.Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

'Ingenious, consistently taut and witty' TLS 'Humorous and quizzical, with a light touch on weighty themes, the narrative darts about with lizard-like colour and velocity' Independent'Strange, elliptical, charming' Guardian'A poetic, beguiling meditation on truth and storytelling . . . from the dreamscapes of magical realism to a gripping political thriller and even a murder mystery' New InternationalistFélix Ventura trades in memories, a slippery character selling new pasts to people whose bright futures lack only a good lineage, and wiping clean the slate of their identity.In a narrative that darts between past and present Angola, a bookish albino man, a beautiful woman, a mysterious foreigner and a witty talking lizard come together to discover their real origins. For theirs is a world where the truth seems to shift from moment to moment and where history itself is up for grabs . . .WINNER OF THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE'A work of fierce originality' Independent'Without doubt one of the most important Portuguese-language writers of his generation' ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES'Cross J. M. Coetzee with Gabriel García Márquez and you've got José Eduardo Agualusa' ALAN KAUFMANTranslated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

While swimming in the clear blue waters of the Rainbow Hotel, Daniel Benchimol finds a waterproof camera, floating seemingly lost in the sea. He goes on to discover that the camera belongs to Moira, a Mozambican artist famous for a series of photos depicting her own dreams. On seeing the images, Daniel realises that Moira is also the mysterious woman whom he has been dreaming about repeatedly. The two meet, and Daniel becomes involved in a unusual dream experiment with a Brazilian neuroscientist, who's working with Moira on a machine to film and photograph people’s dreams. Meanwhile, Daniel’s daughter Karinguiri, one of Angola’s young dreamers, is arrested along with six friends for staging a protest during a presidential press conference in Luanda. The group go on hunger strike, attracting worldwide press attention, showing the power of young people when they raise their voices against the regime. The Society of Reluctant Dreamers is a surreal, vivid novel about the slipperiness of truth and reality, art versus dictatorship, courage versus fear, change and the old order, amidst the politics of Angola's tumultuous past, present and future.

A journalist - the autobiographical features are quite deliberate - is trying to find out what happened to Lidia, who disappeared in Luanda in 1992, a point in time when the civil war flared up again with unprecedented ferocity after rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA movement refused to accept defeat in the country's first free and democratic elections. The story, a tangled mesh of facts and fiction, tells of the disappointment of the two protagonists, which represents the disappointment of a whole nation.