Drawing on what is said to be the real-life story of Ludovica Fernandes Mano, Eduardo Agualusa weaves a deeply affectionate tale of a country baptized in chaos, with a host of characters submerged in or trying to flee from it. After Ludovica’s death in 2010 Agualusa found access to her diaries and drew heavily on them to write his book. In the foreword he writes: “Ludo’s diaries, poems and reflections helped me to reconstruct the tragedies she lived through. They helped me, I believe, to understand her. In the pages that follow, I have made use of much of her first-hand accounts. What you will read is, however, fiction. Pure fiction.”
Ludovica had gone to live with her teacher sister, Odete and her engineer husband, Orlando in pre-independence Angola after their parents death and what she names as “The Accident”. Having always know a sheltered life, attached to her sister as the Siamese twins, and with strong aversion for open spaces, Ludo had found it difficult adjusting to what became her new life. Everything appeared strange to her. In the first few months in Angola, she did not as much as near the windows. She spent so much time alone, until Phantom, her German shepherd dog, came along. Gradually, as the city opened itself like a door to her, Ludo would often sit and watch the African sky, which she describes to her sister as wider than the Portuguese' and crushing. However, this door soon slams shut in her face as chaos breaks out in the city in 1975, and Odete and her husband mysteriously disappear after attending a farewell party two nights before independence. Amid the violence and out of great fear, Ludo barricades herself in the apartment after an unfortunate incident, completely cutting herself off from the rest of the world outside and below. A stranger to everything, she spends each day with Phantom her only companion, watching the sky— blackened, terrifying, strangely lit — as it reeled past. In her solitude, reality bleeds into dreams and dreams into reality, one indistinguishable from the other.
For twenty and eight years she survives on the foodstuff she has left, which depletes as her seclusion extends. She grows seeds on the terrace she was once afraid of climbing. She saves on rainwater, and soon turns to hunting— pigeons and a rooster. Her isolation bequeaths her with a sharp imagination. From the terrace she visualises the world she cannot be a part of, imagines what story each entity existing beyond her terrace bears. A carrier-pigeon she so mercifully sets free on its route with a message to a lover ; a monkey named Che Guevara, to whom she likens her existence. “They were closely related beings, both of them mistakes, foreign bodies in the exultant organism of this city.” She would not die as long as the rebel monkey survived. But when desperation sets in, Ludo, overcome by her sense of placelessness, gives up regret and puts her survival first. She kills Che Guevara for meat. And this was a quite strange experience, for her, for me: In a world that has become exceedingly alien to her, she is determined to not let go, even when her survival is held on the precipice by a string. She burns the furniture to keep warm. And when she has run out of furniture to burn, she turns to the expanse of books Orlando had left behind in his library. What had once been her vehicle of escape to surreal landscapes became fuel to keep her physical body tethered to the present. Ludo crafts dated entries on the apartment walls with charcoal, her attempt at forgetting, at creating a general theory of oblivion.
She writes: “I realise I have transformed the entire apartment into a huge book. After burning the library, after I have died, all that remains will be my voice. In this house all the walls have my mouth.”
When her only companion in the world dies, everything becomes useless. “The look in his eyes caressed me, explained me and sustained me.” She contemplates suicide, fleetingly. She slips back quiet into her imaginations, thinking of anything, everything, but death.
Beyond Ludovica’s hermit universe, there exist an array of characters leading quite interesting lives while grappling with the proxy wars and conflict in the postcolonial state. Scattered across the stretched canvas sky, we meet: a mercenary on the run, a revolutionary and convict turned entrepreneur nicknamed Little Chief, a journalist collecting disappearances, an investigative agent who abandons the corrupt communist regime to become a private eye, a group of cattle-herders from the Kuvale tribe, and a sharp-witted seven year old whose life becomes intertwined with Ludovica’s in an unusual turn of events.
Agualusa’s storytelling is utterly remarkable. With a voice that reads like both a journalist and a masterful storyteller— the storyteller overshadowing throughout. The novel moves at an increasingly rapid pace, employing compressed standalone chapters, sparse details that broaden as you read further, poetry, diary entries— the outcome is an incredible mix of jarring characters with intersecting lives and stories. Stories that move and startle all the way. Mysteries are unraveled as the pages progress, and what might have seemed a tiny spot on a painting expands into vivid meaning before the eyes, full-blown with dizzying colours, leaving you in a “Now-that-makes-sense" state. An absorbing read, Agualusa’s novel initially originated as a screenplay, plans for which fell flat along the way. This makes it all the more interesting because the details are compact in some places, but extensive with sprawling conversations in other places, the effect is a world exploding into motion, with cascading actions, in your mind.
Whereas Agualusa’s character may wish to forget past traumas and start on a fresh slate, the novel itself is a composite work of remembrance. In his interview with Punch Magazine, Agualusa pointed to two theses existing in countries, like Angola, which have gone through serious conflicts, particularly, civil wars: “One says that in order to overcome pain and achieve reconciliation, it is necessary to forget. The other says that, on the contrary, we must remember.” Ludo is keen on forgetting. It would be easier to navigate the world that way, with a new memory, untainted. A memory that is not haunted by looming figures from her past. For her remembering is, perhaps, torture. Practising forgetting is what enables her to forgive even those who are the main architects of her misfortunes, and show them kindness, even.
A General Theory of Oblivion is an immensely satisfying work of literature, well drawn out and will leave you engaged till the very end. In this book, like Ludo, you will dream wide awake.
