The Society of Reluctant Dreamers

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.

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.