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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.
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
Those
We Shall Remember (”Os
Memoráveis“)
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2014, 352 p.
Albania: Ombra ● Brazil: Leya ● France: Métailié 2015 ● Italy:
Urogallo ●
Mexico: Elefanta ● Poland: Świat Książki 2016
The Night of the Singing Women (”A noite das mulheres cantoras“)
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2011, 317 p.
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.
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 ● UK: Harvill 2001 ● US: 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 ● France: Métailié 1989 ● Germany: Suhrkamp 1993, pb 1995 ● Greece: Polis 2002 ● Italy: Giunti 1992 ● The Netherlands: Arena 1991 ● Spain: Alfaguara 2001 ● US: 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 ● France: Métailié 1995 ● Germany: Suhrkamp 1998, Diogenes 2013 ● Italy: Urogallo
2010 ● US: 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:
Best European Fiction 2018
US: Dalkey
Archive Press 2017
Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers
UK: Dedalus, 2018
(several stories, taken from: "A Instrumentalina e
outros contos" and "O Amor em Lobito Bay")