Literary salon with José Eduardo Agualusa
Literary salon with José Eduardo Agualusa and George Chabert, professor of language and literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
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José Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo, Angola, and began his writing career as a poet. He is the author of the poetry collection At the Heart of the Forests, three books of short stories, and the novels The Conspiracy, The Market of the Damned, The Rainy Season, Creole, and The Book of Chameleons, as well as Lisboa Africana (a collaborative project on Lisbon's African community).
Agualusa has been embraced across the Portuguese-speaking literary world. His novel Creole is a best seller and was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature. He has received the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the U.K. for the novel The Rainy Season.
The host, George Chabert, is professor of language and literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
"Imagine Boris Pasternak's Dr Zhivago transplanted to tropical Africa, chopped up into glittering, bloodstained fragments and set to dance to a delirious rumba. Then you might begin to take the measure of this novel of a revolution that devours its children. When Angola's Jose Eduardo Agualusa won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007 with The Book of Chameleons, readers glimpsed the scars of betrayal, loss and grief that lay behind its magically charming surfaces. Yet, without a prior grasp of Angola's punishing trek from Portuguese rule past a disputed independence and into decades of sporadic civil strife, the picture for outsiders remained a little blurred."
Rainy Season
"How many truths make up a lie? This is the question a man asks his daughter, Laurentina, before revealing that her true father is Faustino Manso, the celebrated Angolan musician. The man whom Laurentina has always known as her father defends his lie on the grounds that it contained many truths, all of them happy."
My Father's Wives
All are welcome!