Home » Angola » José Eduardo Agualusa : Os Vivos e os Outros (The Living and The Rest)
José Eduardo Agualusa: Os Vivos e os Outros (The Living and The Rest)
There a few novels on this site featuring literary conferences but this one is slightly different as it is set in Africa and only features African writers. The conference is set on lha de Moçambique) , a resort island off the coast of Mozambique. The writers, at least the ones we meet, seem to be primarily from Mozambique, Angola and Nigeria.
The initial part of the book concerns the writers getting together – they all seem seem to know one another, though not all live in Africa. They chat, they banter, they catch up.
The conference is organised in part by Daniel Benchimol who is somewhat distracted because his wife Moira is in late stage pregnancy. As for the others, we learn their stories. There is Cornelia Oluokun, a Nigerian who has had considerable success and may well be based, at least in part, on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Cornelia has written a feminist version of Franz Kafka‘s The Metamorphosis which has received acclaim, though she will show that Kafka was not her inspiration for the story. However she is not really happy to be there. She tells her husband by phone Half this city’s in ruins. The other half is a slum. There is Julio Zivane who has written the same book several times, about being in a resettlement camp after the Angolan Civil War, with each book told from the perspective of a different person.
There is a certain amount of discussion about what it means to be an African writer. Europeans used to demand that Africans only wrote about Africa and featured wild animals in their books but that has changed. The new wave of African writers, are more concerned with being writers than with seeming African.” This comes up in the discussion and one writer comments To a lot of people, we writers are the new oracles. I’m sorry, I can’t see into the future. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Africa.
And then there is Pedro Calunga Nzagl, the mysterious Angolan poet whose books were censored and then seemed to disappear but, as we discover, not entirely.
We also meet a few strange locals such as the woman who thinks it is still March 1974 and the tramp who dresses in women’s clothing. Both seemingly have literary connections.. There are lots of interesting discussions. Three of them play a game whereby each has to tell two stories, one true and one-made-up and the others have to guess which is which. They all cheat.
Inevitably there is also a romantic fling which, also inevitably, does not work out entirely smoothly.
There are also real writers there: Sami Tchak turns up and others such as Gonçalo M. Tavares and Fatou Diome are expected
But while all this is going on and all but Cornelia seem to be enjoying themselves, there is an ominous threat. It seems that there is a big storm on the mainland. They get occasional glimpses of clouds but everything seems fine on the island weatherwise. However, they seem to have no phone and internet connection. Cornelia sends lots of emails, Whatsapp messages, etc. to her husband, knowing they will not get through. No-one, including the missing participants seems to have been able to get through over the bridge with one exception. A mysterious woman turns up having seemingly crossed the bridge but she has no papers and does not seem to speak a language anyone recognises. The police bravely try to cross the bridge but are driven back by the wind, rain and fog. Others see strange apparitions. The local fishermen are convinced that the rest of the world has ended and they are the only survivors. One man sees his double, another his father, who died twenty years previously and one a character from one of her books. One man comments we’re dead, all totally dead, but the island isn’t paradise, or hell, it’s purgatory. We’ll never get out of this place till we’ve reconciled with one another, and especially with our ghosts.
But still they keep talking – about how they arrange the books in their own libraries, about national identity versus individual identity, and the fact that books know more than their authors do. Two of them write stories about the situation, which we see while two others decide to write a story together about the end of the world which they feel has happened or is happening.
Eventually the police again venture across the bridge and they are in for a surprise.
The novel starts off in a fairly low key way. It is of course interesting to learn about the various concerns, issues and foibles of the African writers and what they are writing and why. It is quite likely some of them are based on actual writers but I am not knowledgeable enough to know if this is the case, apart from my wild guess mentioned above. Gradually but only gradually, Agualusa introduces a sense that things are not quite right. We see symbols – crows! – but also get the feeling that various people, both locals and visitors, have, that something is not quite right, confirmed by the loss of internet and phone connections, the attempt by the police to cross the bridge and the dire warnings of the fishermen, all leading to the quite unexpected ending.
Publishing history
First published in 2020 byQuetza
First published in English in 2025 by Archipelago
Translated by Daniel Hahn