2016 Man Booker Longlist: A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Country: Angola

Translated By Daniel Hahn

Imagine your country gains freedom, but you lock yourself up in an apartment and start seeing the world through the window!

José Eduardo Agualusa who won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007 for his Book of Chameleons, brings to readers a slice from Angolan history in A General Theory of Oblivion. Although, Angola successfully overthrew Portugal in 1974, but, Portugal’s withdrawal from Angola sparked off a civil war that lasted for twenty six years.

On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludovica Fernandes Mano( Ludo in short),a Portuguese expatriate and an agoraphobic woman shuts herself up in her apartment at Luanda, for thirty long years. Her companions become an Alsatian, an old radio which becomes her only mode of reception from the outside world and a library full of books.

Slowly, the little musings of Angola that she could decipher ends as the radio dies out. The window, becomes the only frame of reality for her, through which she sees Angola’s changing history and crisis. Her perspective becomes the most incisive narrative of Angolan history-a female outsider scribbling a subaltern text about her own nation.

If you’ve missed Book of Chameleons, make up with A General Theory of Oblivion. This book will blow your mind off!

Book Details:-        

• About the Author

About Rit Chattapadhyay

A student of literature, I was born in Kolkata, now, reside at Howrah. I completed my high school from St.Thomas' Church School Howrah,and then went on to study English Honours at Asutosh College. Presently, I am pursuing my Masters in English Literature from Calcutta University. Not an avid reader from childhood. My experience with literature intensified in high school and Asutosh College. I love reading works of literature and I am an amateur poet myself. My poems mainly highlight the agonies of modern existence and the complications of love. Being a very opinionated person, I bear distinct opinions about what I read.