A journey across boundaries

Angolan writer of Portuguese-Brazilian origin talks about memory, forgetting and the significance of trying to understand each other, Yang Yang reports.

In mid-August, 64-year-old Angolan writer Jose Eduardo Agualusa paid his first visit to the Chinese mainland. Much as his writing, the trip to China was a journey across boundaries, both spatial and cultural.

Starting on the Island of Mozambique in northern Mozambique where he currently lives, Agualusa flew to the capital, Maputo, then to Lisbon, capital of Portugal, and then to Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, from where he took a train to Shanghai.

He had been invited to China as a guest of the international literary week at the Shanghai Book Fair.

In Beijing and Shanghai, he encountered friendly people and keen readers whose questions showed that they had carefully read three of his novels that have been published in China.

These are A General Theory of Oblivion, winner of the International Dublin Literary Award in 2017 and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2016, The Book of Chameleons, the first African winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom in 2007, and The Living and the Rest, which won the 2021 Portuguese PEN Prize.

Sun Ganlu, vice-president of the Shanghai Writers' Association, says that Agualusa's writing makes use of a calm voice, poetic language and a beautiful narrative rhythm to tell serious and cruel stories, a striking contrast that evokes complex emotions.

Agualusa was particularly impressed by the Shanghai Library East, which he compared to a trove in a forest.