DISPATCH FROM PORTUGAL
Bem-vindo! It's been a week since returning from our excursion to literary Portugal. When we started our Word Travel Book Club in July with Mexico, a lot of us had more familiarity with Mexican authors, but Portugal was much more uncharted territory for our group. Part of that is because fewer Portuguese books have been translated to English. For me, this was a great excuse to dig deeper into a literature that I honestly haven't explored beyond Jose Saramago back when he won the Nobel (in 1998!).
And, in spite of choosing from a smaller pool, we read really widely, with almost no overlap on books or authors. Altogether, our group read:
The Illustrious House of Ramires by Eça de Queirós
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
Requiem by Antonio Tabucchi
The Return of the Caravels by António Lobo Antunes
Grace Period by Maria Judite de Carvalho
Adam & Eve in Paradise by Eça de Quieroz
Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers
Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago
And two readers even chose thriller/mysteries set in Portugal by English-language authors, offering another angle for the conversation:
Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
And, despite not sharing the same book(s), we had a really engaging conversation! A lot of the books had complex narrative structures, from the the labyrinthine sentences of Antunes, to the literary assemblage of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet (which has literally been reordered from fragments in each successive translation). There was a lot of humor — often bawdy and absurdist. The roles of the state and the Catholic church were present in a number of books, particularly by women authors. And like some of the Mexican novels we discussed, many of the Portuguese authors were reckoning with colonial legacies ... only from the other direction, as a former imperial power that at once eulogizes its past glory and wrestles with guilt over its actions.
But don't take this as an exhaustive survey of Portuguese literature. Even with how widely we read, we barely scratched the surface of a country with a deep publishing tradition. Check out precise and feminist short stories, a queer coming-of-age graphic novel, historical fiction of Renaissance Europe, rural stories with fantastical and eccentric characters, a contemporary novel about mixed-race identity, or a story collection fusing African and Portuguese folk beliefs. Come and explore all of our Portuguese books on the shelf or on our website.
And, as always, the exploration doesn't stop here, so I'm including some articles and links below that may lead you on your own Portuguese journey:
Quarantine Reads: The Book of Disquiet by Eddie Grace in The Paris Review
Reflecting on reading Pessoa's magnum opus during the pandemic.
New Ways of Seeing: Interview with Jose Saramago in The Guardian
"my work is about the possibility of the impossible. I ask the reader to accept a pact; even if the idea is absurd, the important thing is to imagine its development. The idea is the point of departure, but the development is always rational and logical."
Geography? It Doesn't Exist: Antonio Lobo Antunes with Alessandro Cassin in The Brooklyn Rail
Antunes comes off as bombastic and contradictory, but I think he is in on the conceit of his persona given how many solid quotes he drops:
"I really don’t know what to call my works. They are neither novels nor poetry so I would rather call them books."
"For me geography does not exist! I strongly object to the whole concept of “foreign literature”...and speaking of national identity: that is how dictatorships get started! In literature there is no periphery and no center; there are only writers."
"Imagination is fermented memory. It is the way we arrange our memories."
GRAND TOUR - a recent Portuguese film following a cross-Asia chase between a distant bureaucrat and his fiancee trying to track him down. Beautiful filmmaking that pairs the scripted period-set scenes with documentary footage of contemporary Asia.
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And maybe close it out with a clip from Portugal's most renowned fado singer, Amália Rodrigues: