Based on a true story, Angolan author Agualusa’s beautifully sprawling and poetic novel, translated by Daniel Hahn, about a Portuguese woman who walls herself into her apartment in Angola just before independence in 1975 has now won the International Dublin Literary award. Snippets of diary entries – sometimes meditative, at other times paranoid and unhinged – interrupt an economical third-person narrative that follows Ludovica’s day-to-day survivalist life, during which she lures pigeons into traps using diamonds, grows vegetables on her terrace and makes bonfires in her kitchen. Through the windows and walls, she glimpses and hears life in the changing city outside (“a distant planet”); through her squinting eyes, we observe the country’s formative years. The book extends far beyond its political setting, however. When Agualusa describes a trauma in Ludovica’s past, he suggests parallels between her agoraphobia and Angola’s colonisation by Portugal. In Angola’s independence and the end of the civil war, we see hope of freedom for Ludovica, from traumatic memories and her fear of people.
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