Isolated intellectuals in an ironic novel

Mozambique, a paradisiacal island that gave its name to the country, has in its history having been a slave export port along with a rich tourist, cultural and building history that led it to be declared a World Heritage Site. Choosing that place to hold a Writers Congress is something not very possible but rather typical. And that a novel begins in this way is already a Western tradition about which José Donoso, among others, ironized in “Where the elephants are going to die”. That territory is the starting point of the new novel by the Angolan Agualusa. The organizers of the seven cultural days are the journalist and writer Daniel Bechimol, confessed alter ego of Agualusa, and the Mozambican Moira Fernándes, his wife, happy, pregnant and about to give birth. Suddenly, when the Congress of Writers has been turning, due to its thirty participants, into a Festival of African Literature and, above all, into a festival of sharp narcissisms, a violent storm breaks out that separates the island from the continent, leaving electricity, cell phones, internet, without the bridge that linked it to Mozambique, and with a tragic event, as if that were not enough. The stories of an isolated group and the love affairs and internal conflicts that are provoked is another old narrative tradition. But here you are in Africa, with African writers, with African traditions and conceptions to which those of the rest of the world have been added and where caricatures of the African no longer appear. The genius of Agualusa turns that island into a dazzling dystopian scenario, where despite the fact that everything is over, people continue to talk about art and literature, where past and present mix, where fiction and reality are as present and interconnected as the dead and the alive, like the literary character and the real person, where what is lost and what is recovered, terror and illusion merge. Suddenly a writer illuminates her identity, and that of the group: “I am from the palm trees, and where there are palm trees I am”. Agualusa uses the climatic frenzy (there is so much rain that memory is erased) to trigger reasoning about history, politics, the various reasons that lead to writing, cynicism and the fetishisms of writers. And when the destroying angel has departed and a new old life arrives, much is amalgamated here, the revelations left open for the enthusiastic delight of the reader.