169 Books: Angola

My Father's Wives by José Eduardo Agualusa

Angola is in western, southern-ish Africa:

And here's the recap of the book:
 When the celebrated Angolan musician Faustino Manso dies, his youngest daughter Laurentina journeys to Angola to trace the story of the father she never knew. Setting out to find the 7 wives and 18 children he left scattered across southern Africa, the fictional account of Laurentina's journey runs parallel with the author's chronicle of the novel's genesis. As the characters and their creator travel the southern African coast-from Angola through Namibia and South Africa to Mozambique-they meet extraordinary people and, along the way, discover Faustino's secrets.

• "How many truths make up a lie?" Whoa. Deep. On the first page. 
• This is written like a diary, which is kind of cool in some ways. However, there are multiple characters "writing" as well as the actual author's story, and I kind of have to guess who's point of view it is. It's irritating to spend half the section trying to figure it out.
• An essay on silences, and how many different silences there are. Happy, sad, afraid, tense, calm, dramatic, and on and on. 
• Even though I haven't read a whole lot of my Around the World books yet, I'm finding a theme about heritage and ancestry. Maybe white people don't really have such strong ties to the past...or maybe just me. I'm having a hard time understanding those potent themes.
• Ah. She slept with her nephew. Cool. 
• "A person who has no enemies doesn't deserve to have any friends."
• There's a lot of discussion about apartheid and frank deliberation about racism, from both the black and white sides. Some really interesting thoughts, I like it. 
• "Life is neither grey nor rose-tinted. It depends on the lenses through which you look at it.
• "Life is no less incoherent than dreams, it's just more persistent."
• There's an interesting twist that she doesn't take very well. Kinda sad.

This book took me for.ev.er. I know. I won't bore you with my myriad of excuses. Only some of them are good. This was definitely a thinking book. There wasn't a whole lot of action, but a ton of interesting thoughts and some discussion on tough topics. I did like the twists but didn't love the main character's attitude toward them. 

Like I said, I was kind of meh about the diary-style narration. Mostly I didn't like that, to an extent, you had to guess which character (or the author) the perspective was in. There were also a lot of references to poems, though I don't know if they're actual poems or the author made them up. Either way, it was a pretty intellectual book. Overall I liked it.