Looping through a series of spirographic circles, Agualusa's narrative draws the story of Ludo's self-confinement into the starry revolving sphere of her adopted country's revolutionary and counterrevolutionary growing pains, encompassing diamond smugglers, government assassin/torturers, disappearing poets and redeemed mercenaries within its scintillating web … An outlandishly orchestrated series of coincidences brings all the revolving characters together into a confrontation outside Ludo's recently opened door, yet the resulting resonances are as profound and affecting as that in any conventional flesh-and-blood chronicle … Agualusa is a master of varied genre structure, and he has great fun shifting from spy novel to pastoral narrative to interior reflection, but his heart is deeply invested in his characters.
At the center of Theory is Ludovica Fernandes Mano — Ludo — a native of Portugal with longstanding agoraphobia...an incident she thinks of simply as ‘The Accident’ cements her unwillingness to venture outdoors … Interspersed with what sometimes feels like a fever dream of Ludo’s survival inside her castle walls are the swirling stories of the people and events in the streets and halls just outside. The tales may seem random and disconnected, but Agualusa is a master storyteller who doesn’t bother to introduce a character or mention an incident unless it has a larger role to play … It’s a tribute to Agualusa’s storytelling that the bittersweet redemption found by his characters feels authentic; he and they have earned it.
A General Theory Of Oblivion begins on the eve of Angolan independence and tells the story of Ludo, an exiled Portuguese who, alarmed by events, bricks herself into her apartment and stays there till it's all over, 28 years later … Angola's civil war became a proxy for various global conflicts and A General Theory Of Oblivion provides occasional primers...thus the uninitiated can keep track of events, even learn a bit of history, as they read. Ludo, on the other hand, becomes ever less aware: the batteries in her radio fail and she must make her own sense of the incidents she sees in the street … Agualusa has many a good story here: the 37 chapters work as standalone shorts, while intertwining and coming together at the end.
In this tale, based on real-life events, one of Angola’s most inventive novelists has found the perfect vehicle to examine his country’s troubled recent past … The subject matter seems perfectly suited to Agualusa, an author with a taste for the outlandish … There is a colourful cast of characters whose lives intersect surprisingly with Ludo’s … Luanda itself emerges as an important player, gradually changing from a cradle of revolution and civil war into a city of unbridled capitalism. Even from Ludo’s detached vantage point, Agualusa excels at conveying the city’s wild, dark enchantment … One of the novel’s characters declares: ‘A man with a good story is practically a king.’ If this is true, then Agualusa can count himself among the continent’s new royals.
… [a] beautifully sprawling and poetic novel … Snippets of diary entries – sometimes meditative, at other times paranoid and unhinged – interrupt an economical third-person narrative that follows Ludovica’s day-to-day survivalist life … When Agualusa describes a trauma in Ludovica’s past, he suggests parallels between her agoraphobia and Angola’s colonisation by Portugal. In Angola’s independence and the end of the civil war, we see hope of freedom for Ludovica, from traumatic memories and her fear of people.
‘A man with a good story,’ Agualusa writes, ‘is practically a king.’ If this is true, then this novel is a kingdom, one brimming with the voices of those trying to survive life during and after wartime … The novel centers on the life of Ludo, an agoraphobic woman who confines herself to an apartment for twenty-eight years, until the war's end. This aspect, which seems like it would be a literary limitation, is used like a wrench, winding up the human condition so that grief, love, memory, and death are all explored within the story as Ludo grapples with her past, present, and a doubtful future … As Ludo tries to unremember her past, and as a nation and a regime try to cover up a history, this book becomes an ode to the forgotten, what can and cannot be retrieved.
Ludo will live alone for 30-plus years, finally accepting Angola as her home and not the land of black savages she had long thought. Her brooding presence is inescapable, though she’s not the linchpin Agualusa evidently intended; there are many other characters whose stories crisscross as war and politics shape their lives … Too many mysteries pile up to sustain suspense, but the novel is redeemed by its bright shimmer of magic realism.
