A Review of José Eduardo Agualusa’s
A General Theory of Oblivion
Originally published in the Minneapolis StarTribune
on December 27nd, 2015
By José Eduardo Agualusa
Translated by Daniel Hahn
Archipelago Books, 244 pages, $18
Like the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa and the Argentinian
Jorge Luis Borges, the Portuguese-Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa is a literary trickster who
dazzles with his artificial fictional creations, but unlike his headier forebears,
his work is rooted in the more complicated and bloody everyday world of
colonial and postcolonial Africa. Basing his new novel, A General Theory of Oblivion, on the story of a woman named
Ludovica Fernandes Mano, who bricks herself into an eleventh-floor apartment
building on the eve of Angolan independence and stays there for almost thirty
years, Agualusa claims to extrapolate his “pure fiction” narrative from her
notebooks and from photographs of the writing she did on her walls, but he in
fact invents the entire thing. Any Internet search about any aspect of her
story comes up empty (mirroring the fruitless web-sleuthwork depicted in a
later section of the novel), yet this brilliant work isn’t any less emotionally
moving or politically weighty because of its fakery.
Looping through a series of spirographic
circles, Agualusa’s unconcentric narrative draws the story of Ludo’s self-confinement
into the starry revolving sphere of her adopted country’s revolutionary and
counterrevolutionary growing pains, encompassing diamond smugglers, government
assassin/torturers, disappearing poets, and redeemed mercenaries within its scintillating
web. An agoraphobe whose tragic history isn’t revealed until the end, Ludo came
to Angola with her sister Odete and brother-in-law Orlando, who works for a
diamond company, and when intrigues cause the other two to disappear, Ludo has
nowhere to go and barricades herself in against the various agents who want to
root out Orlando’s stolen diamonds. Every practical aspect of her
self-sequestration is totally unbelievable, from how she eats and goes to the
bathroom (a problem that’s never mentioned) to even the relationship between
the building and its surroundings, but Agualusa hilariously seems to thumb his
nose while daring the reader to call his bluff.
An outlandishly orchestrated series
of coincidences brings all the revolving characters together into a
confrontation outside of Ludo’s recently opened door, like a parody of the
culminations at the end of each book of John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy, yet the resulting resonances are as profound and
affecting as that in any conventional flesh-and-blood chronicle. Agualusa is a
master of varied genre structure, and he has great fun shifting from spy novel
to pastoral narrative to interior reflection, but his heart is deeply invested
in his characters, and each individual’s unique story burns itself into the
reader to make us reconsider our capacity for empathy and understanding.
Finally finding human connectedness after so many years, Ludo also unwittingly facilitates
connection between the revolving cast around her, creating in this highly
artificial novel a profoundly satisfying and merciful sense of human family.
—David Wiley
—David Wiley
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