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Lídia Jorge Portugal
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Lídia Jorge was born in Boliqueime, southern Portugal, in
1946. She studied French Literature in Lisbon and spent some years teaching in
Angola and Mozambique, during the independence struggle. She now lives in
Lisbon. Her first two novels placed her in the avant-garde of contemporary
Portuguese literature and since then she has received numerous prestigious
awards for her work. In 2013, Lídia Jorge was honoured as one of the “10
greatest literary voices” by the renowned French Magazine Littéraire, and in 2014, she was awarded the Premio
Luso-Español de Arte y Cultura. She has been awarded the Vergílio Ferreira
Award 2015 for her body of work.
Have a look at
the author’s homepage:
Lídia Jorge's
new novel Estuary (“Estuário”) is located in present-day Lisbon. The main character is
Edmundo Galeano, the youngest son of a shipowning family. After a wrong
investment decision by the eldest brother, their possessions are reduced to a
house at the mouth of the Tagus and two ships at anchor costing money instead
of generating it. In vain the father writes letters to the relevant minister,
who was once the boyfriend of his daughter. Edmundo returned three months ago
from a posting with a refugee organization in Africa. He lost part of his right
hand in an accident in Kenya's Dadaab, the continent's largest refugee camp. He
now tries to learn again to write by copying out lines from the "Ode
Marítima" by Fernando Pessoa. He is planning a book about the tremendous
suffering he has seen in Africa, but his father's suicide and the bad luck that
hits his family redirect his interest to his own world and the familiar people
around him. In the end he can only write about them.
Estuary is a
book about the vulnerability of a man, a family, a society and the very
equilibrium of the Earth. A novel of great poetic power about the urgent
questions of our time.
I
wanted to write the story of a family that resisted adversity, each of them
trying to hide their private lives from the other. (...) I wanted this Estuary
to be the simile of the place through which the river of stories flows, pausing
for a moment on the whiteness of the page before disappearing into oblivion.
Lídia Jorge
Those We Shall Remember (“Os Memoráveis”) tells the
intriguing story of a number of participants in
Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974. When the journalist Ana Maria is asked
to make a documentary about this historic event for a US TV channel, she
returns to her native Lisbon. Looking for more information in her father’s
house, who was also a journalist, she finds a photo of some revolutionaries,
taken some time after the event. As she discovers, they all have their own
stories to tell, and their personal experiences will change Ana Maria’s
perception of her country forever.
Written with
great psychological subtlety and power of language, Os Memoráveis is a fascinating literary contemplation of Portugal’s
arduous road to democracy.
A hypnotic novel. This woman deserves, as much as
the Mozambican Mia Couto, to be the second lusophone writer crowned with the
Nobel Prize for Literature.
Le
Figaro
A prose of rare density. Handled with remarkable
skill.
Télérama
How long have we been waiting for a book like this!
Visão
A small masterpiece.
Jornal
de Letras
A flow of talent and sensitivity.
Jornal
i
The Night of the Singing Women (“A noite das
mulheres cantoras”) is written with great psychological subtlety and power of
language. The student Solange, a member of an all-girl band, witnesses the
charismatic lead singer Gisela pressurising young Madalena because she is
pregnant, and then covering up her death. Many years will pass before Solange
can face up to these events again – and to Gisela, the woman she admired so
much back then.
The author is back with A Noite das Mulheres
Cantoras, a novel where guilt, charisma and memory dictate the characters'
survival.
Os
Meus Livros
Her first two
novels placed her in the avant-garde of contemporary Portuguese literature and
ever since she has received numerous prestigious awards for her work. Lídia
Jorge aims to illustrate the changes which have or have not taken place in
Portuguese society since 1974. She mainly chooses two settings: the world of
her childhood, the rural South of Portugal, as for example in The Painter of Birds (“O vale da paixão”) or The Wind Whistling in the Cranes (“O vento assobiando nas
gruas”) or the city of Lisbon, as in News from the City Jungle (“Notícia
da cidade silvestre”) or The
Garden without Limits (“O jardim
sem limites”), except for The
Murmuring Coast (“A costa dos
murmúrios”), a powerful book about the colonial war, which was a
decisive experience for the author’s generation.
Portugal can count among its citizens three of the
premier novelists writing today: José Saramago, António Lobo Antunes and Lídia
Jorge. She writes with a gorgeous economy and an urgent beauty. The Painter
of Birds is the work of a master.
INQUIRER
The Painter of Birds
unites the best of Lídia Jorge’s writing, indeed almost the best of Portuguese
culture, which is always determined to preserve the past, perhaps
nostalgically, but also to conquer the future […] Jorge’s lyrical prose has an
inwardness that is both gentle and brutal; here it attains an unusual beauty.
The Painter of Birds is certainly one of the best contemporary Portuguese
novels.
EL
PAÍS
The novel The Wind is Whistling
in the Cranes (“O vento assobiando
nas gruas”) was published in 2002 and has been awarded the prize of the
Günter Grass Foundation, ALBATROS, in 2006. Grandmother Regina Leandro has fled
from hospital and is later found dead in front of the entrance to the old
cannery in Valmares. Milene, the grand-daughter who lived with her, is the only
one there to organise her funeral; her other relatives are away on holiday.
Milene, a rather simple-minded person, now tries to find the right words to
describe their grandmother’s death to the relatives. The Leandro family,
Milene's aunts and uncles, belong to the wealthy upper-class. The old factory -
founded in 1908 - is meantime being rented and lived in by a large family from
Cabo Verde. Milene, totally exhausted by the events surrounding the death of
her grandmother and initially speechless, is cordially welcomed into that
family and stays with them over night.
Thus The
Wind is whistling in the Cranes is set in two worlds: on the one hand, the
history of the cannery, Milene's aunts and their husbands and men friends, her
cousins, all intent on insuring that their reputation is not tarnished by the
lonely death of the old woman. All kinds of interests have to
be defended, political and financial. The factory is to be sold; the site close
to the beach is ideally located for a modern building project. On the other
hand, there is the family from Cabo Verde, the old Ana Mata, her daughters and
grand-children. A shy relationship develops between Ana Mata’s widowed but
young grand-son Antonio, a crane-driver and father of two children, and Milene.
When the Leandros finally discover this, they are horrified.
The atmosphere in the novel is coloured by Milene’s unprejudiced view of
the people and the events. Looked upon by her relatives as the poor childish
orphan, in the very restrictedness of her small world and in all her innocence
Milene displays great human warmth and courage.
Literary audaciousness and analytic acerbity mark
Lídia Jorge's texts.
Süddeutsche
Zeitung
We Shall Fight the Shadows (“Combateremos a sombra”) is a courageous and political novel about
our times and about Portugal in the era of globalisation. It tells the
fascinating story of three months in the life of the psychiatrist Osvaldo
Campos. In the night of the 31st December 2000, he runs into Rossiana, an
assistant radiologist, who has just seen a drug courier die in her clinic when
a package burst inside his intestines. The clinic is clearly working together
with the drug smugglers. Because she knows too much, she is to be killed, but
can hide in the house where Osvaldo works. A love affair develops between her
and the psychiatrist.
The immediacy of these events finally shakes Osvaldo awake, and through
his patents’ stories and traumas he uncovers a conspiracy trafficking in drugs
and human beings, in which important public figures are implicated. Suddenly,
the evil gets too much for him. “Lying is connected with death”, he writes in
his notebook. He has to act, so he turns to the press.
The novel also passes on a message of hope, despite its bleak view of our
present.
In the book, Portugal is subjected to a constant downpour. Bridges
collapse and the water takes everything with it, including corpses. This
apocalyptic vision reflects that of a depressive country, where lethargy and
apathy have spread like the floodwater – where, in the author’s words, “the
chemists have sold out of sedatives”. The title Combateremos a sombra puts salt in the wound and is an attempt to
stir awareness for the injustices which are all too common in Portugal and
around the world. With the narrative force we have come to expect, Lídia Jorge
invites us to join her in a gripping reading experience.
The psychological tension leads the reader to a unique vantage point, at the hand of a writer who insists in showing that there is nothing more real than dreams, and nothing more fantastic than reality.
Armanda
Alexandra, OJE
Rights
Novels:
Estuary
(”Estuário“)
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2018, 214 p.
France:
Métailié 2019 ● Spain: Libros de la Umbría y la Solana S.L.
Those
We Shall Remember (“Os Memoráveis“)
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2014, 352 p.
Brazil: Leya ● France: Métailié 2015 ● Italy:
Urogallo ●
Mexico: Elefanta 2018 ● Poland: Świat Książki 2016
The Night of the Singing Women (“A noite das
mulheres cantoras”)
Lisbon:
Dom Quixote 2011, 317 p.
Brazil:
Leya 2012, (avail.) ● France: Métailié 2012 ● Israel: Hakibbutz 2017
● Italy: Urogallo ● Romania: Univers 2014
We
Shall Fight the Shadows (“Combateremos a sombra”)
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2007, 484 p.
Brazil: Leya 2014, (avail.) ● France: Métailié 2008 ● Israel: Hakibbutz 2012
The
Wind Is Whistling in the Cranes (“O vento assobiando nas
gruas”)
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2002, 538 p.
Grande Prémio de Romance 2003, Prémio Correntes
d’Escritas 2004
Brazil: Record
2007 ● France: Métailié 2004 ● Germany: Suhrkamp 2005 ● Israel: Hakibbutz 2007 ● Italy:
Urogallo ● Serbia:
Arhipelag 2011
The
Painter of Birds (“O vale da paixão”)
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 1998, 241 p.
Brazil: Record
2003 ● Croatia: Hena-Com 2017 ● France: Métailié 2000 ● Germany: Suhrkamp 2000 ● Greece: Polis 2004 ● Israel: Hakibbutz 2005 ● Italy: Bompiani 2003 ● Romania: Editura Art 2008 ● Slovenia: Mladinska 2007 ● Spain: Seix Barral 2001 ● Sweden: Bromberg 2001 ● Taiwan:
Marco Polo Press ● UK: Harvill 2001 ● USA: Harcourt 2001
The
Garden without Limits (“O jardim sem limites”)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote
1995, 375 p.
France: Métailié 1998 ● Germany: Suhrkamp 1997, pb 1999 ● Greece: Polis 2001 ● Spain: Alfaguara 1995
A
última dona
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 1992, 337 p.
France: Métailié 1995 ● Romania: Editura Art
The
Murmuring Coast (“A costa dos murmúrios”)
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 1988, 259 p.
Film directed by Margarida Cardoso, 2004
Brazil: Record
2004 ● Bulgaria: Five Plus 2011 ● Colombia:
Ediciones Uniandes 2018 ● France: Métailié 1989 ● Germany: Suhrkamp 1993, pb 1995 ● Greece: Polis 2002 ● Italy: Giunti 1992 ● The Netherlands: Arena 1991 ● Spain: Alfaguara 2001 ● USA: Univ. of Minnesota Press 1995
News
from the City Jungle (“Notícia da cidade
silvestre”)
1984, Lisbon:
Dom Quixote 1994, 354 p.
France:
Métailié 1988 ● Germany: Suhrkamp 1990, pb 1992 ● Spain: Alfaguara 1990
The
Pier of the Snacks (“O cais das merendas”)
Lisbon:
Europa-América 1982; Dom Quixote 1995, 251 p.
The
Day of the Miracles (“O dia dos prodígios”)
Lisbon:
Europa-América 1980; Dom Quixote 1995, 206 p.
France:
Métailié 1991 ● Germany: Beck & Glückler 1989, Suhrkamp pb 1992 ● The Netherlands: de Prom 1996
Stories (selection):
O
amor em Lobito Bay
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2016, 192 p.
Spain: Libros de la Umbría y la Solana
Praça de Londres
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2008, 98 p.
Italy: Arcolaio ● Slovenia: LUD
O
belo adormecido
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2004, 241 p.
Marido
e outros contos
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 1997, 141 p.
Bulgaria: Five
Plus ● Germany: die horen 1999 ● Slovenia: LUD ● Spain:
Ed. Xerais 2005 (Galician)
A
instrumentalina
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 1992, 39 p.
Brazil:
Peirópolis ● Colombia: Editorial Caballito de Acero S.A.S. 2019 ● France: Métailié 1995 ● Germany: Suhrkamp 1998, Diogenes 2013 ● Italy: Urogallo 2010 ● USA: Grand Street 1999
Children’s books:
O
romance do grande gatão
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2010, 48 p.
O
grande voo do pardal
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2007, 28 p.
O conto do nadador
Lisbon: Contexto, 1992
Italy: Urogallo
Participation in anthologies:
Zwischen
den Büchern
Germany: Weissbooks 2018
Best European Fiction 2018
USA: Dalkey Archive Press
2017
Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers
UK: Dedalus, 2018
(several stories, taken from: My Dear Bicycle and Other Stories [“A
Instrumentalina e outros contos”] and Love
in Lobito Bay ["O Amor em Lobito Bay”])