My A+ year with African literature continues in José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, translated by Daniel Hahn. When I first heard about this book, I believed I squawked at Whiskey Jenny, “Look, ooh, oh, look at this! It’s about an Angolan woman who walls herself up in her house during the Angolan fight for independence! Sounds amazing!” and Whiskey Jenny was like, “….Does it?”
I get her point. When you read a lot about nations fighting free of colonialism, there are patterns of violence and oppression that repeat themselves in exhausting, predictable ways. Police oppression, warring ideologies, journalists being disappeared, developed nations denying aid and responsibility. You can sympathize with the heroine of A General Theory of Oblivion, Ludo, who builds a wall between herself and her terrifying, rapidly changing world. She retreats behind it and finds a way to live her sharply circumscribed life without reference to the people and events happening beyond her borders.
In the midst of the most poisonous election season in my memory, at a time when a man with legally purchased guns can walk into a gay night club and murder dozens of people, it’s easy to see the appeal of the kind of detachment that Ludo creates for herself. Instead of engaging with the world she’s been given, she chooses a world she can control. She has to eat trapped pigeons, burn her books, write on her walls, and content herself with the tiny, incomplete glimpses of the rest of the world that she can spot from her own window; but it at least puts herself in her own power and nobody else’s.
Except: We are not made to be islands. Ludo is a cog in the history of her country (as we all are), and a cog in the lives of other people (as we all are). Even as extreme a retreat as Ludo makes from the world is insufficient. There are always other people, and they will come climbing up scaffolding and battering through walls, and you are a citizen of the world whether you want to be one or not. A General Theory of Oblivion is a dreamy meditation on the connectedness of human lives, strangely merciful in spite or because of its clear-eyed acknowledgement of the horrors of which we humans are capable.
In related news, I don’t know enough things about Angola. Must rectify.