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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 Estuário
(“Estuary”) 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
Os Memoráveis (”Those We Shall Remember”) 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
A noite das mulheres cantoras ("The
Night of the Singing Women") 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 O vale da
paixão (“The Painter of Birds”) or O vento assobiando nas gruas (“The Wind whistling in the Cranes”)
or the city of Lisbon, as in Notícia da cidade silvestre (“News from the
City Jungle”) or O jardim sem limites (“The Garden without Limits”),
except for A costa dos murmúrios (“The murmuring Coast”), 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 O vento assobiando nas gruas (“The
Wind is whistling in the Cranes”) 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
Combateremos a sombra (“We Shall Fight the Shadows”) 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:
Estuário
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2018
Os
Memoráveis
Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2014, 352 p.
Albania:
Ombra ● Brazil: Leya ● France: Métailié 2015 ● Italy:
Urogallo ● Poland: Świat Książki 2016
A
noite das mulheres cantoras
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2011, 317 p.
France: Métailié 2012 ● Israel: Hakibbutz 2017 ● Italy:
Urogallo ● Romania: Univers
2014
Combateremos
a sombra, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2007, 484 p.
France:
Métailié 2008 ● Israel: Hakibbutz 2012
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
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
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
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 ● Netherlands: Arena 1991 ● Spain: Alfaguara 2001 ● US: Univ. of Minnesota Press 1995
Notícia
da cidade silvestre, 1984, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1994, 354 p.
France:
Métailié 1988 ● Germany: Suhrkamp 1990, pb 1992 ● Spain: Alfaguara 1990
O
cais das merendas, 1982, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1995, 251 p.
O
dia dos prodígios, 1980, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1995, 206 p.
France:
Métailié 1991 ● Germany: Beck & Glückler 1989, Suhrkamp pb 1992 ● 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")