For almost a decade, the Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa has made his home on the Island of Mozambique, a thin strip of land off the northern coast of Mozambique steeped in history and poetic lore. Now 64, Agualusa first came here to research his 2008 novel, “My Father’s Wives,” which featured a young woman from the island who made documentary films.
Years later, reflecting the synchronicity of life and literature that he revels in, Agualusa met a documentary filmmaker from the island — and married her. “I’m here because of her, but also because I really love the place,” he explained on a recent video call. “It’s a kind of destiny.”
Agualusa’s sly, provocative works — including “The Book of Chameleons,” “The Society of Reluctant Dreamers” and “A General Theory of Oblivion” — are often driven by premonitions, dreams and strange convergences of time and fate. His latest, “The Living and the Rest,” out this month from Archipelago Books, though inspired by the real-life charms of Mozambique Island, similarly veers into surreal territory.
In the novel (like the others, translated from Portuguese by his longtime collaborator Daniel Hahn), the island’s natural beauty and “radiant mixture” of cultures make it an ideal setting for a literary festival, drawing writers from across the continent to discuss issues of African creativity and identity. As the writers arrive, they carry with them their own mental baggage, slightly wary of each other as well as the island’s daunting remoteness.
When a powerful storm cuts off access to the mainland and all phone and email contact, the writers become increasingly tense. They mingle, squabble, drink heavily — and begin to be visited by visions of their own fictional characters walking among them. Are these hallucinations, hauntings, or simply role-playing actors?
You have entered Agualusa’s world, where the boundaries between the real and imaginary are porous, and dreams become their own reality.
“Agualusa is one of the prophets of our African ‘marvelous’ complexity, a complexity that is not merely literary but deeply and intimately lived,” the Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor wrote by email. “In his novels, the marvelous is not something distant or fantastical, it is woven into the fabric of everyday life.” (Owuor, an avowed fan, invited Agualusa to the 2022 edition of the Macondo Literary Festival, which she co-founded in Nairobi in 2019.)
According to the Mozambican author Mia Couto, a close friend and mentor, Agualusa has been greatly influenced by examples of Latin American literature, like many African writers of their generation. But it would be a mistake, he added by email, to label it “magical realism.”
Agualusa himself prefers to describe his work as “African realism,” he said, inspired by the multiple realities that coexist in his homeland. Owuor agrees, seeing it as a reflection of a specific African worldview,
“not a genre but a way of being, a way of seeing the world that is resonant with the ordinary living of our worlds within worlds.”
In “The Living and the Rest,” Agualusa invokes his own literary pantheon, referring in the text to Fernando Pessoa, Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortázar and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. But perhaps none are more apparent than Franz Kafka — one character, a successful Nigerian novelist, has written a best seller entitled “The Woman Who Was a Cockroach” — and Jorge Luis Borges.
Borges, in fact, has featured prominently in Agualusa’s work before — trapped in a version of hell in the story collection “A Practical Guide to Levitation” and, most memorably, in the guise of an erudite gecko in “The Book of Chameleons.”
“Borges is very important to me,” Agualusa said, “because more than the fantastical, the most important thing for me is the absurd — the way people relate to absurdity, how it infiltrates reality and people accept it as natural.”
He paused, then added, “Look at the United States right now — the reality is absurd and people live with this as natural!”
If America appears disorienting at the moment, Agualusa has known worse, experiencing Angola’s violent descent into civil war after independence in 1975. It is a period that recurs in his books, often with time loops — in dreams and memories — to that fractious era.
In “A General Theory of Oblivion,” the protagonist literally barricades herself inside her Luanda apartment, freezing time on the eve of independence. In “The Living and the Rest,” one character behaves as if it were eternally March 1974.
“I’m obsessed by the idea of time,” Agualusa confessed. “I really believe that time, like Einstein said, is an illusion.” Owuor, stressing the “transtemporal” quality of his work, called Agualusa’s version of time “a spiral, a mosaic.”
Curiously, “The Living and the Rest,” which was written just before the pandemic, seems to anticipate its sense of isolation and dread. “That was a coincidence, but literature is like that,” Agualusa grinned, marveling at how writers appear to predict, or even evoke, events in the future (like his own marriage).
Of course, Agualusa has been wrestling with his country’s past for years, exploring ways it continues to shape the present and future. His work, according to Couto, has run parallel with Angola’s story.
“The writers of our generation were not only witnesses but intervening in a process of creating founding myths of their nations,” Couto, 69, explained. “Agualusa’s entire journey is marked by a dialogue between his history as a person and the history of his nation that is younger than him.”
A degree of optimism ultimately informs “The Living and the Rest,” as the writers at the festival begin to see the world — and themselves — in new light. “I’m from the sea and the forests and the savannas,” one freethinking author from Angola insists. “I come from a world that hasn’t arrived yet: with no god, no kings, no borders and no armies.”
After the storm has passed, a feeling of possibility returns to the island: Teenagers begin “excavating their country” with shovels; authors start “rewriting the world” with their words and imaginations. There is a creative renewal that Agualusa believes necessary, especially today.
“We live in a time when it’s very important to build new dreams,” he said. “We must start dreaming again, in a collective way. That’s the only way to transform the world: to dream together.”
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