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José Eduardo Agualusa Angola
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José Eduardo Agualusa
was born in Huambo in 1960 and is considered one of
Angola’s most important writers. He studied in Lisbon and currently lives in
Portugal, Angola and Brazil. Both as a novelist and a reporter Agualusa has become an important voice of his country.
In 2007, Agualusa was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
José Eduardo Agualusa’s
crossover novel A vida
no céu (“Life in Heaven”) tells the extraordinary
story of 16-year-old Carlos, who was born in the skies and goes looking for his
father.
When the earth becomes too hot to live on after
excessive global warming, people start building whole balloon cities in the
sky. Carlos himself was born in a floating colony called Luanda. When his
father disappears after a tragic balloon accident, Carlos is certain he
survived. Travelling on his own in his family’s balloon, he discovers a
floating Paris full of unknown wonders, makes friends and falls in love for the
first time. But will he also find his father?
Full of adventure, mystery and passion, A vida no céu is a moving book about friendship that addresses
pressing sociological and ecological topics in an elegant and intriguing way.
José Eduardo
Agualusa’s latest novel, Teoria geral do esquecimento
(“A General Theory of Oblivion”), tells the true story of Ludo,
a Portuguese woman who, horrified by the ongoing
events of the Angolan War of Independence in 1975, bricks herself into her
apartment in Luanda for almost thirty years. Interlinking Ludo’s
tale with the moving stories of other characters and writing with a subtle
irony that emphasizes the amazing coincidences of life, Agualusa
creates a convincing and charming whole.
Everything in this implausible,
vibrant and intricate Luandan world is plausible.
Expresso
A book that hooks the reader from
the very first page.
JL
José Eduardo
Agualusa’s new novel Milagrário pessoal (“Personal Notebook of
Miracles”) is both an unusual love story and a journey across the history of
the Portuguese language. When Iara makes the
incredible discovery that the Portuguese language is being infiltrated by
amazingly familiar-sounding new words, she asks her professor, an 80-year-old
Angolan anarchist, for help. Together they go looking for a mysterious list of
words which were once stolen from the language of the birds.
Milagrário pessoal confirms Agualusa as a great writer. This book is a declaration of
love to the Portuguese language.
O Globo
Angola need no longer be on the
look-out for a chronicler of its history - his name is José Eduardo Agualusa.
Cristina Krippahl
Barroco tropical ("Tropical Baroque") tells a passionate
love story hurtling inevitably towards an abyss, just like the Angolan society
in which it is set. Bartolomeu is a well-known author
and filmmaker, his girlfriend Kianda an
internationally celebrated singer. When the famous television presenter Núbia de Matos dies a violent death after openly addressing
child abuse and drug use among the country’s powerful men, Bartolomeu
decides to investigate her murder…
Barroco Tropical veers between shock and rapture,
between a furious dynamic and the tradition-laden weight of identical
recurrences. A breathtakingly masterful novel.
Frankfurter Rundschau
Agualusa entertains himself and us with his talent for spreading happiness. I would say that in current Portuguese literature there is nothing as spectacular as this.
Alexandra Lucas Coelho, ípsilon
Moving between fiction and reality, in As mulheres do meu pai (“My Father’s Wives”) José Eduardo Agualusa tells the story of the musician Faustino Manso, who, at his death, left eight widows and eighteen
children in different cities and countries across Africa. Laurentina
is a film director who lives in Lisbon. When her mother dies, she leaves a
letter telling how Laurentina was adopted in Angola
and that her real father was Faustino Manso. Laurentina decides to go to Africa to find out more about
the father she never knew, and to make a documentary about the life of the late
musician.
Together with a group made up of her boyfriend Mandume, her newfound nephew Bartolomeu, her photographer Jordi and the driver of their ancient vehicle, Pouca Sorte, they set out from Luanda, the Angolan capital, heading for Mozambique, via Namibia and South Africa. The narration through the eyes of the different characters and their different perspectives leads the reader on a journey across modern-day Africa and into its historical roots, through times of political struggle and a still-present sense of mysticism. The idea of the African Male is deconstructed as the narration progresses, in a very human manner, bringing to light the power held by African women.
Laurentina returns to Lisbon at the
end of the long journey, pregnant and certain that Faustino Manso
was sterile. As mulheres de meu
pai is a journey that takes the reader to Africa
in its music, cooking, passions and landscapes. Through his depiction of the
harsh reality of an Africa that is still suffering from the wounds of its
difficult past, Agualusa brings out simply the
richness of these countries and their inhabitants, making a refreshing change
from the gloomy news of the international media.
In Africa, where some see light, others see only shadows, Agualusa chooses the light. A radiant humour and humanity speeds this novel through its picaresque twists and turns.
Boyd Tonkin, The
Independent
With charm and colour, Agualusa
celebrates the creole world of Portuguese Africa.
Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
The novel O vendedor
de passados (“The Book of
Chameleons”) has been drawing a lot of attention since its publication and has been
reprinted several times. The albino Félix Ventura lives in Luanda in a big
house full of books and earns his living by offering an altogether unusual service:
he invents pasts. After decades of war, Angola is undergoing rapid change. It
is home to many people with absolutely unimaginable careers, but their pasts
are not always quite presentable if they want to have a promising future. So
Félix Ventura invents acceptable pasts for several people - they all receive a
family register with family photographs and the necessary documents. The
omniscient narrator tells the story from a rather intriguing perspective: that
of a lizard. In the fiction of reconstructed pasts much turns out to be real.
With ironic nudges and winks, Agualusa holds up a
mirror to his country and stages a complex confusion in which truth and lies,
reality and fiction lead to a surprising end.
Fierce originality, vindicating the power of creativity to transform the most sinister acts. Not since Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis have we had such a convincing non-human narrator, brought vividly home to us by Daniel Hahn.
Amanda Hopkinson, the Independent
Agualusa weaves a gorgeous and intricate story about a man who trades in memories, selling people pasts to help reinvent their futures.…There’s a murder mystery here, and not only a meditation on the nature of memory. Agualusa’s deftness and lightness of touch means we buy into the strange setup with scarcely a blink. He’s a young master.
, L.A.
Times
José Eduardo Agualusa
is an exceptionally gifted author. His new novel appears quiet and discreet,
charming and sensitive. Agualusa has mastered the art
of the fine and unagitated style.
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
His first book A Conjura (“The Conspiracy”) is a historical
novel set in Angola in the period between 1880 and 1911. As in his later novel,
A nação crioula (“Creole Nation”), Agualusa paints a
fascinating portrait of a society marked by opposites, in which only those who
adapt have a chance of succeeding. The necessary process of adaptation
corresponds to that of creolization. By this Agualusa not only means mixing
black and white, but above all, mixing different cultures, a theme on which this
author, himself a Creole, focuses again and again in his subsequent works.
Apart from his novels, Agualusa has also
published poems, short stories and a children’s book, which won several prizes
for the text and the illustrations.
Rights:
Novels:
A conjura, Lisbon: Caminho 1989, 203 p.
Brazil: Gryphus 2009
Estação das
chuvas, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1996, 279 p.
Brazil: Gryphus 2001, Língua Geral 2010 ● France: Gallimard 2003 ● Spain: Bronce 2002 (avail.) ● UK: Arcadia 2009
Nação crioula, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1997, 159 p.
Bangladesh: Sandesh ●
Brazil: Gryphus 1999, Língua Geral 2011 ●
Croatia: Meandar ● Germany: dtv 1999 ● Netherlands: Meulenhoff 2003 ● Spain: Alianza 1999, Magrana (Catalan)
1999 ● UK: Arcadia 2002
O ano em que
Zumbi tomou o Rio, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2002, 282 p.
Brazil: Gryphus 2002 ●
France: Métailié 2007 ● Italy:
Nuova Frontiera 2004 ● Spain:
Cobre 2004
O vendedor de
passados, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2004,
232 p.
Film rights sold to Conspiração
Filmes, directed by Lula Buarque de Hollanda
Brazil: Gryphus 2004 ● Bulgaria: Prozoretz ● Croatia: Sysprint 2008 ●
Egypt: Sphinx ● Estonia: Varrak 2011 ● France:
Metáilié 2006 ● Germany: A1 Verlag 2008 ● Hungary: L’Harmattan ● Israel: Kinneret
2012 ● Italy:
Nuova Frontiera 2008 ● Korea: Joongang
Books 2010 ● Netherlands: Meulenhoff
2007 ● Romania: Corint 2009 ● Russia: Ripol ●
Serbia: Dereta 2008 ● Slovak Republic: Slovart 2008 ● Spain:
Destino 2009 ●
Taiwan: Ye-Ren ● Turkey: Pegasus 2009 ● UK:
Arcadia 2006 ● US: Simon & Schuster 2008
As mulheres
do meu pai, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2007,
382 p.
Brazil: Língua Geral 2007 ●
Croatia: Meandar 2010 ● France:
Métailié 2009 ● Germany: A1 Verlag 2010 ● Italy:
Nuova Frontiera 2010 ● Netherlands: Meulenhoff 2008 ●
Poland: Znak 2012 ● Serbia: Dereta ● Spain:
Destino ● UK: Arcadia 2008
Barroco
Tropical, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2009,
342 p.
Brazil:
Companhia das Letras 2009 ● Croatia:
Meandar ● France: Métailié 2011
● Germany: A1 Verlag 2011 ●
Italy: Nuova Frontiera ● Mexico: Almadía ●
Netherlands: Meulenhoff 2010 ● Serbia:
Dereta
Milagrário
pessoal, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2010,
184 p.
Brazil:
Língua Geral 2010 ● Serbia: Dereta ● UK: Arcadia
Teoria geral
do esquecimento
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2012, 237 p.
English sample translation available
Brazil: FOZ 2012 ● France: Métailié
A vida no céu
Lisbon: Quetzal 2013
Stories and other texts:
A feira dos
assombrados, 1992, Lisbon: Dom Quixote
2001, 147 p.
Lisboa
africana, Lisbon: ASA 1993, 158 p
Fronteiras
perdidas, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1999,
118 p.
Denmark: Ørby 2001 ● Italy: Morlacchi 2000
Um estranho
em Goa, Lisbon:
Cotovia 2000, 168 p.
Brazil: Gryphus 2001, 2010 ● Italy:
Urogallo 2009
A substância
do amor, Lisbon:
Dom Quixote 2000, 196 p.
Dançar outra
vez, Luanda:
Caxinde 2001, 87 p.
Catálogo de
sombras, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2003, 151 p.
Manual
prático de levitação, Rio de Janeiro: Gryphus 2005, 153 p.
A Educação
Sentimental dos Pássaros, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2011,
126 p.
O Lugar do Morto, Lisbon: Tinta da China
2011, 157 p.
Brazil: Gryphus
● Italy: Urogallo 2012
Catálogo de
luzes
Medellín: Tragaluz
(forthcoming in November 2013)
Selected
stories:
Sweden: Alma viva 2001 ●
Italy: Edizioni dell’Urogallo 2009
Picture books:
Estranhões
& Bizarrocos
Ill. by Henrique Cayatte
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2000,
61 p.
Several awards for text and
illustrations
Brazil: Língua Geral
A girafa que
comia estrelas
Ill. by Henrique Cayatte
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2005,
25 p.
Brazil: Língua Geral
Nweti e o Mar
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2011,
44 p.
Brazil: Gryphus
2012