Transparent City

Despite my personal history of book club and book challenge failures, I am slowly plugging away at the Reading Around the World challenge. I started early in 2020 with Afghanistan and Albania. When the libraries reopened, I got started again with books from Algeria and Andorra. Finding an Andorran book was a challenge. Choosing a book for the next country, Angola, wasn’t easy either, but the book I chose, Transparent City by Ondjaki, presented some challenges of its own.

Angola

I’m Jon Snow when it comes to Angola. When I got to Angola in the Reading Around the World challenge, I couldn’t think of a single mental association with the country. It was news to me that Angola is a Portuguese-speaking country. I knew Portugal used to be the biggest empire in the world, but I didn’t know Angola was part of it. I even had to look it up on the map to find out that Angola is in the southern part of Africa on the western coast. My extreme ignorance meant that every little detail in the book would be new knowledge.

I probably should have looked up some basic information before I started. It might have been helpful to know that Angola achieved independence in 1975 as a communist country already in the midst of a civil war (with the US supporting opponents of the ruling party) that lasted until 2002. That was at least a decade after abandoning Marxism. But it took at least another decade before they had a proper election. Also, there’s oil.

Choosing the Book

Wherever possible I try to read a novel by a native of the country who still lives there, rather than a visitor, expat or exile. That’s not always possible. Because men unfairly dominate the canon, I give preference to female authors. Having mostly read Muslim and/or extremely patriarchal countries so far, that has also been a challenge. And I try to find an indigenous author rather than one associated with colonial power when there’s a choice. Finally, with nearly 200 countries in the world, even a book hoarder like myself can’t afford to buy a book for each country, so I try to limit myself to what’s available at the Seattle Public Library.

I looked up female authors from Angola and found few novelists, even fewer available in translation, and none in the library system’s collections. A Year of Reading Around the World chose Ondjaki’s The Whistler. My library didn’t have that one, but they did have two other Ondjaki books. I chose the more recent one, Transparent City.

Ondjaki

Born in 1977, the same year as my younger brother, Ondjaki (pen name for Ndalu de Almeida) is Angola’s literary rock star. He was born in and still lives in the capital city, Luanda. That location seems to be a central focus of most of his work. A strong sense of place is desirable in a challenge like this one, which makes him a good choice. That work includes film, poetry, short stories, children’s books and novels, but only a handful of those titles are available in English. He’s won a bunch of awards.

Transparent City

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Ondjake put out a new novel in Portuguese in 2020. But before that his most recent novel was 2012’s Transparent City, which only got an English translation in 2018. It braids stories of the residents of an apartment building in Luanda with those of politicians and a couple of foreigners. It’s a bit of a stretch to say there’s a plot, exactly. But things happen to people, and the people and events are all interconnected. There are themes or topics. Transparent City is very concerned with the things that were lost when communism was replaced by capitalism; and by the way that common people are harmed by oil interests and privatization. Most descriptions of the book say as much – what none of them warned me about was the surrealism. Which is fine; I like surrealism. But I wish I had known going in.

A bigger challenge for me was the absence of terminal punctuation. I found one period on page 32 (probably a typo). Sometimes quotation marks are used, or brackets around thoughts, but not always. Otherwise, the only punctuation is line breaks and a lot of commas. Capitalization is also rare. I’m not sure what the point of that choice was. But it really made me work as a reader without any obvious payoff.

Conclusion

I can’t say I ever got used to the punctuation. But despite being put off by that, I did eventually get into the story, such as it was. The scenes which at first reminded me of pretentious black and white art films where you can never make out a narrative did eventually resolve into something resembling a plot. Even if I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the world they lived in and where exactly the line between Luanda and fantasy fell, I started to care for the characters. I mourned their losses – both the real and surreal ones.

I probably would never have discovered this book or its author without this reading challenge. And even though it was challenging, it was a very good book. I’m glad I read it. In the future, if I see new translations of Ondjaki or even other Angolan writers, I will probably pick them up.

Details

Transparent City, (Os Transparentes) 2012
Ondjaki
Translated from Portuguese by Stephen Henighan, 2018
Biblioasis
318 pages