The Living and the Rest - José Eduardo Agualusa

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The Living and the Rest

by
José Eduardo Agualusa

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Living and the Rest
Author:	José Eduardo Agualusa
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2020 (Eng. 2023)
Length:	276 pages
Original in:	Portuguese
Availability:	The Living and the Rest - US
	The Living and the Rest - UK
	The Living and the Rest - Canada
	Les vivants et les autres - France
	Los vivos y los otros - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Portuguese title: Os Vivos e os Outros
Translated by Daniel Hahn

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Our Assessment:

B+ : enjoyable and creative writers-and-writing focused novel

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The Guardian	A	27/9/2023	John Self
Le Monde	.	7/3/2023	Gladys Marivat
The Washington Post	.	1/5/2025	Robert Rubsam

From the Reviews:

"Agualusa’s funny and lively tale turns increasingly ominous ahead of an explosive conclusion. I give it four stars -- and a half." - John Self, The Guardian

"« Presque » est le mot qui résume le mieux l’esthétique du roman. Rien n’est jamais sûr ici. La fin du monde est peut-être arrivée, toutefois les rencontres littéraires se poursuivent. Les invités continuent d’écrire, de lire les ouvrages des uns et des autres et de se raconter des histoires, se mettant au défi de distinguer les vraies des fausses. Peu à peu, la chaleur et l’océan liquéfient les frontières entre fantasme, rêve et réalité." - Gladys Marivat, Le Monde

"Agualusa is attempting to integrate quite a lot into his novel: individual perspectives and creative approaches from mythical storytelling and political parable to postmodern metafiction and postcolonial autofiction. His precisely controlled style works better for some than others. In the early going, he successfully sublimates political, cultural and human concerns into daily life; the home stretch becomes weighed down with incident, reducing potentially complex characters to their roles in varyingly effective melodramas." - Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

The Living and the Rest is set on Ilha de Moçambique and covers seven days. It is 2019, and the first Ilha de Moçambique Literary Festival is to take place here but there is a big storm and on the first day those who have made it to the island, or were already there, find themselves cut off from the rest of the world, with even the phones and internet not working. As the short final chapter of The First Day sums up:

That is how it all begins: the night splitting open in a huge flash, and the island separating from the world. One time coming to an end, another beginning. Though nobody realized it then.

       The Belly of the Atlantic-author Fatou Diome, as well as Breyten Breytenbach (Voice Over) and Gonçalo M. Tavares (The Neighborhood, etc.) are among those who don't make it over. Among those who do make it are Nigerian author Cornelia Oluokun -- "the main headliner at the festival", author of the bestselling The Woman Who Was a Cockroach, --; Jude D'Souza, author of Such a Dark Light (whose narrator is also named 'Jude', though the author doesn't think of the book as autobiographical: "I like exploring the possibility of being someone else, someone unlike me, while still being myself. I like confusing readers, too"); and Júlio Zivane, whose first novel, A Refuge in the Camp, gained some notoriety and success -- and so: "Over the next five years, he wrote A Refuge in the Camp seven times. He didn't manage to get any of the new versions published,"
       Daniel Benchimol -- a writer who has been on the island for three years -- and his very pregnant wife Moira are running the festival, which goes on despite the situation they find themselves in, becoming somewhat more impromptu, though there are still panels and readings. In the novel's short chapters, Agualusa also weaves in and out between the many authors who have made it and the various interactions, with each other as well as some of the locals, which include some unusual characters.
       There's a variety of discussions about literary matters, including what one might expect at an international literary festival in Africa, such as one author's observation that:

For a long time, European critics used to demand that we only wrote about Africa. The Africa they imagined. An African writer who opted, oh, I don't know, to write a novel about the Spanish Civil War would be considered a lunatic. Fortunately that's changed.

There are the usual other struggles of writers as well -- not least Cornelia's, who, after her big hit, had told a journalist that her next project was: "a big novel, a huge novel, telling the story of a Nigerian family from the mid-nineteenth century up until 2050", but it hasn't managed to take hold and she now finds that she: "cannot write the novel they are expecting from her". Will she find inspiration here ?
Beyond that, there's the whole issue of everyone on the island finding themselves cut off from the rest of the world, which means that things begin to get a bit more uncomfortable:

Some hotels have run out of fuel for their generators and without air conditioning it's almost impossible to breathe in the bedrooms, there's no beer on sale anywhere, etc.

At some point they have to wonder whether something more serious than just a storm has happened -- as, it eventually seems, something has. At one point Moira addresses the writers, insisting:

“Calm down, people! It’s not the end of the world.”
Or maybe it is, she adds. The world is wiped out every moment. And every moment it re-begins.

In any case, the writers have a lot to deal with, in their various encounters, books they come across -- and are trying to write --, and the weight of past and present, neither of which can be escaped. As one writer sums up:

(T)he 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.

       (And, yes, there are a variety of ghosts, including the spectral kind.)
       Near the end, Daniel is given a manuscript titled The Benchimol Enigma; he burns it after reading its surprising contents, quickly summarized here -- though Moira pulls out the last, not completely burned page of the notebook, where it says: Ilha de Moçambique, 30 November 2019 -- which is what readers will then also find at the very conclusion to The Living and the Rest ..... (And, yes, author Agualusa apparently settled on Ilha de Moçambique a while back .....)
       If a bit crowded with writers, The Living and the Rest isn't merely a literary festival-novel, with Agualusa weaving quite a bit else in as well -- and the uncertainty of what happened beyond the island helps add some decent tension (escalating nicely as well, even without going all-in apocalyptic). The many different literary games and issues are interesting -- though mostly fairly lightly handled -- and while the novel is a bit too busy, it nicely covers a lot.

- M.A.Orthofer, 12 June 2025

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Links:

The Living and the Rest:

Archipelago publicity page
MacLehose Press publicity page
Métailié publicity page
Edhasa publicity page
Quetzal publicity page
Excerpt

Reviews:

José Eduardo Agualusa:

José Eduardo Agualusa at Mertin Witt Literary Agency

Other books by José Eduardo Agualusa under review:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of books from and about Africa
See Index of Portuguese literature
Other books from Archipelago Books under review

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About the Author:

Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa was born in 1960.

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