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Our Assessment:
B+ : enjoyable and creative writers-and-writing focused novel See our review for fuller assessment.
From the Reviews: - Return to top of the page - 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.”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 - Return to top of the page - The Living and the Rest:
- Return to top of the page - Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa was born in 1960. - Return to top of the page -
© 2025 the complete review
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