Not for me, this one, too experimental and hard to follow. From one of Portugal’s most acclaimed novelists, and based on his own personal experience, it’s an exploration of how the past haunts the present and how it’s impossible to escape retribution. The basic story is straight-forward enough. A young Angolan boy is “adopted” by a soldier who is part of a unit that destroys the child’s village during the colonial war in that country and kills his parents. The soldier takes the boy back to Portugal but the trauma each has experienced is too deep for any sort of accommodation between them, let alone any intimacy. In 25 chapters, each a single sentence, perspectives alternate between characters and place. I found it an unsatisfactory read, repetitious, and the shifting viewpoints disorientating. It’s a damning indictment of war, to be sure, with war’s atrocities and barbarities described in graphic detail, but all the jumping about prevented me from relating to the man or the boy.

An extremely difficult and experimental novel which I had high hopes for; brilliantly written, lyrical and engaging, tragic and liberating.

Literary, beautiful, and engaging to the mind and heart. I loved this translation and felt that this would be a book that I would gladly share with others who enjoy well-written reflections on life.

Thank you to Yale University Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was excited to be okayed for an ARC of this memoir, but have had to accept that it's much too experimental for me. I struggled through to the halfway point, but cannot cope with the lack of sentences, the jumps from one perspective/time to the next without a clear indication of who is speaking in which time. The reviews I have read are rapturous, but unfortunately I cannot share their opinion.