Our Portuguese reading group is back for a second consecutive year and will be discovering some of the best recent books published in the Portuguese language from around the globe.
Following on from last year’s all-Brazilian reading list, this year’s selection spans three continents, transporting readers to Brazil, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Portugal, and takes in fiction and non-fiction. First, we have Ricardo Lísias’s A vista particular, a riotous and timely exploration of our sensationalist society which centres on an up-and-coming Brazilian artist and parodies the 19th century serialised novel; next, we have Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de memórias coloniais, a moving and brutal account of the author’s early years spent in Mozambique that exposes long-standing myths about Portugal’s colonial past; then, it’s Joaquim Arena’s Debaixo da nossa pele, both a personal exploration of his Cape Verdean heritage and a wider look at prominent – and often overlooked – black figures in European history, written in an itinerant style that has been likened to W.G. Sebald; finally, we have Teresa Veiga’s Gente Melancolicamente Louca, the latest collection of short stories by the three-time winner of the Grande Prémio de Conto Camilo Castelo Branco – Portugal’s most prestigious short story prize – and an undisputed master of the form. Below, you’ll find further information on the books selected and links to discover more about the authors.
We hope you’ll join us in reading these wonderful books. Please feel free to get in touch by adding your comments to the author pages. We’d love to see you at our meet-ups around the UK and North America too!
How it works
1. To read the whole book, you please order the books yourself from a shop or library if you can. If you have trouble finding a title, we may be able to lend you a copy – email info@andotherstories.org to be put in touch with the organiser, letting us know where you live.
2. Read the books, then add your thoughts in the comments below.
3. Join us at a meet-up in the US or UK to discuss what we have read. You can be sure of lively, well informed discussion.
Where and when
Reading Period:
July – October 2019
Meet-ups:
US meeting(s): contact info@andotherstories.org to be put in touch with our US group’s organiser Bruna Dantas Lobato, if you’re interested in meeting up in person or a Skype discussion.
US meeting: 12.30pm to 2pm on Saturday, 9th November at American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference, Rochester, USA
Skype Meeting: 2pm EST on Sunday, 17th November.
UK meeting(s): contact info@andotherstories.org to be put in touch with our UK group’s organiser Victor Meadowcroft, if you’re interested in meeting in UK locations.
London Meeting: 6.30pm on Wednesday, 22nd October at Three Kings pub, 7 Clerkenwell Close, Clerkenwell, London EC1R 0DY.
Portugal meeting(s):contact info@andotherstories.org to be put in touch with our Portugal group’s organiser Jethro Soutar.
Portugal Meeting: Wednesday 6th, November 2019 at Ler por aí… Book shop, Rua Jacinta Marto 10B, 50-192 Lisbon, Portugal
Thanks to support from Arts Council England, we can subsidise travel to the UK meet-ups. Please get in touch via info@andotherstories.org if that would help.
Discussion
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A Vista Particular (The Private View)
About the Book

José de Arariboia is a 35-year-old artist with a relatively well-established career. His series of paintings on Rio de Janeiro have garnered some success, and he’s preparing for his first solo exhibition. Everything changes, however, when he enters the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela. An unexpected performance drives people into a frenzy. What could have been a catastrophe turns into a media sensation. Filmed by pedestrians, the event goes viral online, and Arariboia strikes up a partnership with Biribó, a favela drug dealer, who is willing to help the artist with a bold, new idea: turn the favela into a work of art, shining a light on daily life in the community. Blending biting satire with social criticism, A Vista Particular is a book that takes readers to the limits of—and makes them question—the absurdities of everyday life.

Caderno de Memorias Coloniais (Notebook of Colonial Memories)
About the Book

A young girl grows up in Mozambique surrounded by daily scenes of brutality. The white colonisers hold all the power, and maintain control of the black population through a combination of physical violence and damaging, dehumanising stereotypes. For the young Isabela Figueiredo, nobody embodies this ruthless power more than her own father, who thinks nothing of dealing out insults and beatings to his black workers. But as Portugal’s colonial empire starts to crumble, the whites find that power has begun slipping through their fingers. Sent back to ‘the metropolis’ for her own safety during the violent aftermath of Mozambican independence, Figueiredo is confronted by a perception of the former colony as having been some kind of exotic paradise where blacks and whites lived in harmony, a narrative completely at odds with her own lived experience. In order to address the shame she feels over her colonial past, Figueiredo will have to break ranks with other retornados – who still claim they would be welcomed back in Mozambique with open arms – and risk betraying the memory of her own beloved father in an act of enormous honesty and bravery.

Gente Melancolicamente Louca (Melancholically Mad People)
About the Book

An orphan girl stumbles into a romantic entanglement after another. A stripper contemplates the possibility of love. A plain girl decides to join the convent after a traumatic incident. Gente Melancolicamente Louca (Melancholically Mad People) is a masterful story collection about power, innocence, trust, and imagination, set in a world at once mystical and utterly mundane.

Debaixo da Nossa Pele (Under Our Skin)
About the Book

When a chance encounter with a painting of a Lisbon street scene from 1570 leads author Joaquim Arena to the discovery of João de Sá Panasco, a black knight who was born a slave but became a nobleman under Dom João III, this begins an investigation into other former slaves who overcame racial prejudice to become prominent – and often forgotten – figures in European history, including Dido Elizabeth Belle (an influential English gentlewoman), Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal (a distinguished member of Peter the Great’s imperial court and great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin), Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (a celebrated French general in the Napoleonic Wars and father of the famous writer), Jacobus Capitein (one of the first black Africans to study at a European university before becoming a pro-slavery Christian minister in the Netherlands) and Anton Wilhelm Amo (a prominent German philosopher). While conducting this investigation, Arena learns of the death of his estranged step-father, providing the springboard for reflections on his own family life and, by extension, the Cape Verde immigrant experience. Encompassing autobiography, travel writing, essay, journalism and fiction, Debaixo da Nossa Pele has been described as the closest thing Portuguese literature has produced to the narrative style of W.G. Sebald.
Muito obrigado!
Thank you, Ricardo, for writing the book! A few of us in the group have already read it and the rest are looking forward to it.