Angola — A General Theory of Oblivion

José Eduardo Agualusa’s book is so so so so so good. Read it now. Why are you reading this when you could be reading that?

Two people recommended Angolan books to me, and while Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent by Pepetela sounded amazing (a comedy with a strong thread of social commentary about a fat detective who thinks he is James Bond ) I couldn’t find it as an English e-book so I read A General Theory of Oblivion pretty much by default. And it’s the best book I’ve read in years.

Arguably José Eduardo Agualusa had a co-author, maybe even two. According to an author’s note at the beginning (and the reviews appear to take it at face value) there really was a woman called Ludovica (Ludo) Fernandes Mano, she really did respond to Angola’s independence by bricking herself up inside her luxurious triplex apartment with roof garden where she really did live entirely self sufficiently for 28 years, and she really did fill dozens of notebooks and all the walls of her house with thousands and thousands of diary entries. Agualusa claims that he took excerpts from this writing, augmented them (he admits in the acknowledgements) with two micro poems he commissioned from the Brazilian poet Christina Nóvoa in the same style, and arranged them into the scaffolding of a novel, which he then filled in with a story entirely of his own invention.

But what a scaffolding! Like a (more) real life version of Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile it’s eerie, at times poetic, and always intriguing. One of the first things she wrote on a wall is a typical example:

The days slide by as if they were liquid. I have no more notebooks to write in. I have no more pens either. I write on the walls, with pieces of charcoal, brief lines.

I save on food, on water, on fire and on adjectives.

I think about Orlando. I hated him, at first. Then I began to see his appeal. He could be very seductive. One man and two women under the same roof — a dangerous combination.

(OK it’s a little bit Castle of Aughhhh to write on a wall that you are writing on a wall because you have run out of paper, but as with everything else in this book, this too is neatly tied up at the end)

But what’s really fun about this book is you are not trapped in an apartment with one person, fascinating as Agualusa makes both her unusual personality and her quest for survival (think The Martian in a condo). Instead this book is an absolute romp: a detective noir of sorts, with elements of French farce, that roams the nation and the decades with new incidents on every page.

And while the story is hugely entertaining on this superficial level, with moments of neat denouement clever enough to make me laugh out loud twice, it is also clearly intended to be more than a list of connected stuff that happened. There is metaphor and allegory here, probably layers upon layers of the stuff, and it treats the audience with enough respect not to make all of it obvious. One could spend a happy month deconstructing it. I almost did, but then decided that for once I’d resist my urge to dissect everything until only entrails are left and instead just sit — at least for a while — with the experience of the book: the allusions I got, the allusions I could sense were there but couldn’t quite make out, and the ones I missed entirely.

Sorry I got pretentious for a moment there. This book has a hippo that dances the rhumba.

But just to dive in to but one example of what I mean: the plot is hugely contrived, absurdly so. Utterly improbable coincidences occur almost every other page. This is clearly a deliberate style choice, and I think with it Agualusa is trying to show a number of things:

• That we are all delicately interconnected, and even someone who believes they have immured themselves from the outside world will find that their actions continue to shape the lives of dozens of people in profound ways, many of which they will never know
• The central place of the various things Ludo is a metaphor for (the violence of colonial settlement, the violence committed against colonial settlers, her racism, the misogyny she experienced, the places and people where Portugal and Africa meet, unsolved disappearances, perpetrators of atrocities never held to account, shattered families, recording yet forgetting — or perhaps recording so one can forget) within Angola’s history and present, and the manner in which it moulds the society and its attitudes
• The rather more tangible ways in which a few individuals who’ve known each other since they were teens have become Angola’s elite, some through privilege and others through luck. Now they get to live in its elite apartments, and have become central to everything that happens in the nation for better and, mostly, for worse. Those bonds of class solidarity and antagonism can now unify the formerly tortured and their torturers and divide former comrades — but only sometimes (this is a rare book that actually gets accountability: redemption is possible for some but not for others, and the agency is not with the person seeking forgiveness).
• Maybe something more I haven’t quite got my head round around the idea of memorialisation vs oblivion. How much does what happened thirty years ago matter, and should you help it mean more or try to make it mean less? If every little incident has profound consequences does that mean we should remember everything, or not worry about anything? And is the magnitude of a crime the magnitude of its intent or of its effects?

I’ve never been to Angola (it probably rose to the top of my bucket list a few years back when I finally ticked off the DRC), I don’t know its politics well, and I haven’t dived deep enough into the reviews to find out how well Angolans felt their nation was portrayed. But the book left me with a real sense that I had now experienced a taste of the place. In particular it was noticeable how many clear similarities there were with other places I know well where small world clubby elitism meets total impunity for mass murder.

I don’t really have an ending, but just do yourself a favour and read the book.