FSG Originals – serie

The discrete yet overlapping tales in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida's Three Stories of Forgetting explore the lives of three men—perhaps already dead in the eyes of God—who live within the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the spoils of the Portuguese Empire. They are all incarnations of our despair in the face of the questions that history does not answer. In 'The Vision of the Plants,' Celestino, an old slave trader, returns to the solitude of his home and garden after a life of horrors. In 'Seaquake,' Boa Morte da Silva, an Angolan who served on the Portuguese side in the Colonial War and has become a valet in Lisbon, writes to his daughter asking for forgiveness. And in 'Bruma,' an old slave initiates a young Eça de Queiroz into the world of French literature, even as he finds himself trapped by his own demons.Left to their agony, remorse, and guilt, or undeserved peace, the three men may be tormented ghosts who cannot find rest. Perhaps the land they aspire to, their home in this world, is a place hidden in their souls, somewhere between nowhere and goodbye. Their lives are unstable chapters in postcolonial history and allegories of the reading and rereading of that history, and of literature. All three have been expelled from their lives, sent on a solitary journey into the night.

Chilco is the name of Pascale’s home island. It is also the Mapudungun word for fuchsia: a word that evokes tropical lushness and the deep greenness of the forest. Pascale's partner, Marina, grew up in the vertical slums of Capital City, a place scarred by centuries of colonialism and now the ravages of feckless developers. Every day the couple fear a sinkhole will open up and take with it another poor neighborhood, another raft of refugees from the hinterlands: the indigenous, the poor, who are toiling for an all-consuming machine that is devouring the earth from beneath their feet.When they finally flee the collapsing city to live in Chilco, are they escaping centuries of colonial repression or merely stepping into a twisted new version of it? From her first days in this place Marina can’t avoid the feeling that everything is decaying around her - there is a smell of putrefaction in the air that no one except her can detect; there are seismic rifts that the political cruelties of the times have opened up in her own relationship with Pascale; and she is haunted by insistent memories of her past.In this baroque, tropical jeremiad, the wounds of capitalism and empire inflict themselves on the person and on the land, but linger most devastatingly in language and memory. Indigenous Mapudungun and Quechua words, history, and cosmology form the chorus to this tropical fever dream of life, love, death, and friendship.

A stunning new literary vision of India. In these dozen minutely observed stories, Jeyamohan juxtaposes the great themes of Indian life - politics, religion, caste, violence - in illuminating relation to the quiet internal machinery of his characters.In “A Hundred Armchairs,' a bureaucrat receives the news that his mother has been found in a hospital for the indigent. As he rushes to her side, he is visited by memories of his nomadic youth with her, of her violence and mania, her wild fear for his safety, his forced adoption and education by a local guru. In 'Elephant Doctor,' a young man spends a restive night at an elephant camp waiting for a call from the office of the president; he has spent months advocating for an award for his idol, Dr. Krishnamurthy, one of the country's preeminent conservationists. But in the still hours of the morning he's haunted by questions about the doctor's enigmatic ways and the strange magic of this dark corner of the forest.The tales in Stories of the True live in the shadowland between truth and fiction, blending real life with the prismatic effect of Jeyamohan’s volatile and incisive prose. The result is a collection that shimmers with life and wisdom and a truth greater than truth all on its own.