5 "imperfect, jagged, deep, revelatory and revolutionary" stars !!!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and translator as well as Archipelago Books. This was originally published in 2017 in Portuguese and won the 2019 Angolan Prize for Culture and Arts. This English translation was published in March 2020. I am providing my honest review.

Let's move away from Europe (both West and East), let's move away from America (both white and black). Let us immerse ourselves in Angola, Cuba and Brazil. Light skinned African and very dark Portuguese. Colonials overthrown by dictatorships just as cruel. Wealth stolen, money disdained, the people are rising.

Dreams, premonitory. Dreams, mystical and healing. Dreams, revolutionary.

Male friendship, ex-wives, new lovers, past flames. The ocean and journalism. Poetry and brave daughters. Memories reconfigured. Art from dreams. Dreams from art. Mass protest, pacifism, hunger strikes, taxi rides.

I swirled and swayed inside this novel. I understood some but knew so much more. My cells quivered and my soul lifted.

Bravery and courage is needed for a better world.

A book so foreign yet strangely familiar. Unsettling but utterly satisfying.

I've read some wonderful books published by Archipelago and wanted this to be one of them, but I couldn't keep up with the multiple narratives. I read about 20%. I did some reading on the recent history of Angola in preparation, but I just couldn't quite fit all the points of view and dream narratives together in my head together so I could enjoy the story.

As the title suggests, this is a book about dreams and dreamers. Set in present day Angola, it deals with the country’s difficult past while being hopeful about the younger generation bringing in a better future. Although I found its surrealism a little bit messy at times, it was also compelling, unique and a very good read.

After a difficult day in court divorcing his wife, fifty-something journalist Daniel Benchimol goes to a beach hotel for a long swim. While in the water, he finds a waterproof camera and dreamlike photographs featuring Cotton-Candy-Haired-Woman who has appeared in his own dreams. She turns out to be a Mozambican artist Moira who stages her own dreams in her art and after the two meet, Moira goes to Brazil to work with Helio, a neuroscientist who records people’s dreams. Moira helps him turn these recordings into films.

Back in Angola, Daniel befriends Hossi, owner of the beach hotel who was once an interrogator for revolutionary guerrillas. After a near death experience, Hossi no longer dreams but has appeared in other people’s dreams as the man in a purple coat. Daniel, like many Angolans who have lived through the many political upheavals is apathetic about politics and current affairs. This changes after his daughter Karanguiri, a student activist, stages a protest with a group of friends that ignites the country, as if waking it up after a long sleep.

This is my first book by Jose Edoardo Agualusa, only after I finished reading it did I learn that he also wrote The General Theory of Oblivion, which sounded very intriguing but I never got around to reading. I will correct this soon. I also learned that Agualusa based the novel on real events – Karanguiri’s protest was inspired by a real group of protesters, for example and reading the book, I couldn’t help thinking that there were elements of auto-fiction here too.

I liked a lot of Agualusa’s ideas about the power of dreams and dreaming; being afraid of dreams because they expose our most intimate thoughts; inability to delineate dreams from reality; dreams turning into reality, which can be taken as a metaphor of dreaming about a better future for Angola, expressed by Karanguiri’s activisim. And despite the ending perhaps being too idealistic and some of the ideas above not being fully explored, I still think The Society of Reluctant Dreamers a really good book, one that I would recommend.

My thanks to Archipelago and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review The Society of Reluctant Dreamers.

The title of this translated-from-Portuguese novel intrigued me.

The main character Daniel is a journalist who encounters a wide array of motley and unusual folks through his work, friends and chance circumstances. His activist daughter is another figure who plays prominently in the narrative.

The story is a wild trip around the world and through people’s consciousness. There were so many characters which made the plot hard to follow at times, but descriptions of the various settings and were vividly illustrated. I enjoyed it, but only give three stars due to the complicated storyline. Some wonderful quotes though:

“All dreams are frightening, because they’re intimate. They’re the most intimate thing we have. Intimacy is frightening.”

“Echoes,” she said. “Dreams are always echoes of something.”

”To anybody with any imagination, the past is constantly changing. You think the present is born out of the past, but it’s the other way around. The present creates the past. Somebody with imagination isn’t bound to the past, let alone to borders.”

“If each day falls, / inside each night, / there exists a well / where clarity is imprisoned. / We must sit on the rim / of the well of darkness/ and fish for fallen light / with patience.”

”I wanted the light to wash me. Light can wash you, it can clean away the bitterness, but it doesn’t help you to forget.”

3.5 stars, rounded down to 3. I was given a copy of this book in return for an unbiased review.

The book is set largely in Angola, a country I know very little about, so I was interested to read a book set there in the hope of reading and learning a bit about the country and the people there - but this was not the book for that.

It would be unfair to criticise the book in that regard as it doesn't set out to be a book to educate people on the country, but at the same time I felt a bit lost as there were aspects of personality and culture that had a bearing on the story, that were clearly important, but which I didn't really feel like I understood. This still isn't really a criticism though, the author is Angolan and writing, presumably, for an audience who are familiar with Angola, it just might explain some of the disconnect I felt.

<spoiler>The plot of the book relates the story of a journalist, divorced with an adult daughter, and his attempts to make sense of his place in a shifting society, and dealing with his daughter's imprisonment as the result of her revolutionary activities. This plot really just carries on as a sort of backdrop to an examination of dreams and dreamers, which is the main concern of the book.

We have our main character who dreams about a woman, then manages to meet her, his friend about whom people in his vicinity can't help but dream, and a psychologist who has invented a machine that can record, to an extent, people's dreams. Each of these were interesting ideas in themselves, and each of them had an important bearing on the story as well, but I felt like none of them were really dealt with in enough depth, or with enough focus on the consequences, emotional and otherwise, of delving so deeply into people's dreams.

The main character, Daniel, was the only one we really got to know and even then, his motivations remained somewhat mysterious, in that his personality and opinions seemed to change and shift without reason or justification. Moira, Hossi, and Karingiuri, however, never really seemed to become more than one dimensional props in Daniel's story.</spoiler>

Ultimately, the book felt flawed in that none of it was dealt with in enough depth. I didn't feel like I was with Daniel through his journeys or his struggles, I didn't really get to grips with the implications of the examinations of dreaming, and while the ending was satisfying, it lacked some of the catharsis that might otherwise have been achieved if I'd felt more invested.

Partly this was down to the matter of fact way in which everything was told. The book was written like a big list of things that happened, one after the other, told somewhat flatly. It lacked a bit of colour or spark. I've read a few translated books lately which have felt similar and I wonder if it's at least partly a result of the translation, not that it's a bad or flawed translation, just that different languages are constructed differently and are used differently to tell stories.

I have no idea if that's the case, if there is some inherent difference between languages that makes novels fundamentally different, or if the translations I've read of late have been lacklustre, or if the issues I have are just with the source material. In any event, I can only review the book as I read it, and while I enjoyed it well enough, and it kept my interest to the end, it was ultimately unremarkable and a little bland.

'“I was lying, yes, I invented the whole thing. Or–no, no, I wasn’t lying. What difference does it make?”

“It does, it does make a difference!” I shouted.

“It doesn’t, seriously. It doesn’t matter in the least. What matters is that you believed it. While I was telling you my story, you believed it. While I was telling you my story, the whole thing was true.”'

The last two translations by Daniel Hahn from José Eduardo Agualusa originals, The Book of Chameleons and A General Theory of Oblivion (my review:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1576159376) won the IFFP (forerunner of the Booker International) and Dublin Literary Prize respectively.

The author has described
The Society of Reluctant Dreamers as "uma fábula política, poética, satírica e divertida, que desafia e questiona a natureza da realidade, ao mesmo tempo que defende a reabilitação do sonho enquanto instrumento da consciência e da transformação" (google translate: a political, poetic, satirical and entertaining fable that challenges and questions the nature of reality while defending the rehabilitation of the dream as an instrument of consciousness and transformation.)

Angolan journalist Daniel Benchimol reappears from A General Theory of Oblivion, again a specialist in investigations to things that have mysteriously disappeared, here his preoccupation the real-life case of the mysteriously vanishing Boeing 727 (https://www.themorningbulletin.com.au/news/mystery-of-the-missing-727-plane/3471561/).

The novel takes its title from various characters he meets, an ex-Unita military operative who appears in other people's dreams, an artist who depicts her own dreams and a neuroscientist attempting to record people's dream (based on the author's conversations with the real-life neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidarta_Ribeiro).

Meanwhile Benchimol's daughter is part of a group of young people who practice non-violent protests against the Angolan regime - and the novel was inspired by the real-life 15+2 movement in the country (see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/30/angola-book-club-dos-santos-arrests and https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/case/case-history-angola-15).

In the novel his daughter and her colleagues shower the President with literal blood money, but the 15+2 detainees were originally arrested for reading subversive literature, notably Gene Sharp's [book:From Dictatorship to Democracy|1119326] which has served as something of a inspirational manual for non-violent insurgents groups from Serbia, to the Arab Spring and in Angola. The Financial Times in 2012 described Sharp as "the Lenin of the new Gandhi-ism" and referring to a new trend of "the wildfire spread of systematically non-violent insurgency. This owes a great deal to the strategic thinking of Gene Sharp, an American academic whose how-to-topple-your-tyrant manual, From Dictatorship to Democracy, is the bible of activists from Belgrade to Rangoon".

Benchimol's daughter ultimately is the novel's real focus. He is now divorced from her mother, who came from a higher social class, and his daughter tells him of how she struggled to find an identity, but also contrasts the rather passive acquiescence to the regime of Benchimol and his compatriots to the younger generation's resistance:

'I grew up divided between different worlds, too. Worse than that, I grew up a stranger to my own country.

At first, I thought Angola was the name for the network of condos that are home to Mamã, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, and all their friends. I thought Angola was this big network of condos separated from one another by pieces of wasteland: Africa. I believed our employees lived in condos, too, with names like Rocha Pinto, Cazenga, Golfe, or Catambor. One day I asked Teresa (my nanny–I hope you remember her) if the swimming pool in the condo where she lived was bigger than ours. Teresa told me that where she lived, they call the rain-puddles swimming pools and each person has their own. At the time, I didn’t get the irony.

Later, I thought Angola was mostly made up of bohemian artists who on Saturdays would gather at each other’s homes, to drink beer, to smoke dope, to discuss plans they would never carry out. Almost all of them expressed contempt for money and mocked the luxury condos where my mother and her family live. Today I know they despised money only because they have enough not to have to think about it.

Poor people don’t despise money. I only got to know the Angola of the poor–I won’t say the real Angola, but the one that represents the overwhelming majority of Angolans–a few years ago. Strange as it may seem, I recognized myself in it. I’ve ended up in this prison because I decided to be Angolan. I’m fighting for my citizenship. Fear destroys people. It corrupts more than money. I’ve seen that happen in Mamã’s Angola Condo. I’ve seen that happen in your Artists’ Republic. I see it happen, too, in the Angola where almost all Angolans live. Fear isn’t a choice.

There’s no way to avoid feeling fear. And yet we can choose not to give in to it. My companions and I have chosen to fight against fear.'

The novel has a rather (over-?)idealistic end as the power of dreams proves more than equal to that of the regime, but then Agualusa's point is the power of non-violent insurgency, which has indeed (albeit not yet in Angola) effected considerable political change.

A novel that has a lot going on, including indirect references to many real-life people and events as shown above, and perhaps lacking a little coherency as a result. But nevertheless another striking novel from this author/translator combination and one I would expect to see figuring in awards in 2020. 3.5 stars rounded to 4.

3.5 stars. An Angolan journalist, living in a liminal state after his divorce, begins to have strange dreams. He meets a man who appears in others' dreams. On day, while swimming, he finds a camera floating in the ocean. It contains dream imagery that immediately captivates him. This find leads him to travel from Angola to South Africa to Brazil and back. In the meantime his daughter, a political prisoner, acts out her dreams for a better Angola by going on a hunger strike.

I've read two other books by Angualusa: The Book of Chameleons and A General Theory of Oblivion and loved each for their rich imagery, use of magic realism and the author's ability to invite the reader into his dream-world. This book too offers the same invitation into a dream-world. Logic and time are distorted; images are vivid and portentous. However, I did not like this novel as much as I hoped I would as the last third of the story dragged and I didn't really care about any of the characters. Nonetheless, I'd recommend this for fans of magic realism or for those wishing to learn more about Angolan society and the lingering impact of colonialism and inequality.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for offering me an ARC in exchange for a fair review.

Surreal political fable.

Angolan journalist, Daniel Benchimol, comes across a mango-yellow camera floating in the sea. The camera belongs to Moira, the Cotton-Candy-Hair-Woman. Daniel hasn’t met Moira yet, but he has been dreaming about her. They meet and become involved with a Brazilian neuroscientist creating a machine to photograph people’s dreams.

While Daniel’s dreams are visions of the future, his student daughter dreams of a better future for Angola.

Written in a fabulist style, The Society of Reluctant Dreamers blurs the boundaries between dreams and reality. Agualusa’s inventiveness is compelling, but his characters’ reliance on aphorisms appears lazy.

For me, a bonus with reading the novel is that it has considerably enhanced my appreciation of the political environment of Angola.

Be warned: substantial chunks of the novel are in italics.

My thanks to NetGalley and publisher, Steerforth Press, for the ARC.

There are lots of different threads in this novel. They swirl around one another, often confusingly. The don’t necessarily resolve themselves.

All this is appropriate because the main subject of the book is dreams. Not only is the book about dreams, but it feels like a dream as you read it.

Daniel Benchimol is a journalist. While out swimming one day, he finds a waterproof camera floating in the sea. When he looks at the memory card, he sees pictures of Moira, a Mozambican artist famous for depicting her dreams in her photographs. Strangely, Daniel himself has repeatedly dreamt of Moira without knowing she actually exists. Daniel, we learn, often dreams of people he has not met and of future situations he has not yet, but will, experience. Moira seems to broadcast her dreams so that they are shared by others. Hossi, and ex-UNITA guerrilla and now the owner of the hotel that Daniel often uses, appears in other people’s dreams, people who do not know him but recognise him when they see him. When Daniel and Moira meet, they get involved with Helio who is a neuroscientist working on a machine to record dreams in the form of movies.

We enter a story in which waking life and dreaming life are blended and confused. Not all communication between characters happens when they are awake. We skip around a lot of different countries (Angola mainly, but also South Africa, Mozambique, Cuba and Brazil) and the sense of dreaming is increased by there being no descriptions of the travel involved: characters decide to go somewhere and then, in the next paragraph, they are there! This is a narrative technique as opposed to some kind of magic (I think), but it adds to sense of a dream world.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s daughter is a dreamer of another kind with a dream of a better Angola. She is arrested for staging a protest in Luanda and the struggle to regain her freedom begins.

Meanwhile, Daniel, wearing his journalist’s hat, is investigating the strange disappearance of a Boeing 727.

It is all rather surreal. I have to confess that in the two nights’ sleep I had over the 3 days I spent reading this book, I had some very strange and vivid dreams myself. I don’t know if that is coincidence or something to do with the book’s language or subject matter.

Back in 2016, when it was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, I read Agualusa’s book “A General Theory of Oblivion”. These are the only two of his novels that I have read and they are also, I think, the only two books I have read that discuss the situation in Angola about which I know nothing except what is in these two novels. One of the reasons I enjoyed reading this book is for the glimpse it gives me into a culture about which I know so little. This novel, as with the other one I read, presents us with a vision of a country carrying wounds from its past and still battling to find healing for its future. Against this backdrop, Agualusa tells us a story about dreams and their role in our waking lives. I’m not quite sure where the missing 727 fits in, but maybe that will come to me in a dream later tonight.

This is 3.5 stars rounded up because of the interest it stimulates in a different culture.