The Society of Reluctant Dreamers
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
While swimming in the clear blue waters of the Rainbow Hotel, Daniel Benchimol finds a waterproof camera, floating seemingly lost in the sea. He goes on to discover that the camera belongs to Moira, a Mozambican artist famous for a series of photos depicting her own dreams. On seeing the images, Daniel realises that Moira is also the mysterious woman whom he has been dreaming about repeatedly. The two meet, and Daniel becomes involved in a unusual dream experiment with a Brazilian neuroscientist, who's working with Moira on a machine to film and photograph people’s dreams.
Meanwhile, Daniel’s daughter Karinguiri, one of Angola’s young dreamers, is arrested along with six friends for staging a protest during a presidential press conference in Luanda. The group go on hunger strike, attracting worldwide press attention, showing the power of young people when they raise their voices against the regime.
The Society of Reluctant Dreamers is a surreal, vivid novel about the slipperiness of truth and reality, art versus dictatorship, courage versus fear, change and the old order, amidst the politics of Angola's tumultuous past, present and future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
False memories and clairvoyant dreams combine in Agualusa's sweeping, intricately plotted tale (after A General Theory of Oblivion) of personal and political history in Angola. After criticizing the Angolan government in a Portugese newspaper, middle-aged journalist Daniel Benchimol is fired at the behest of his powerful father-in-law and soon divorced. Set adrift, Daniel checks into a beachside bungalow. While swimming one day, Daniel recovers a waterproof camera containing photographs of a woman who has been appearing in his dreams. She turns out to be Moira Fernandes, a Cape Town artist who takes dreams as her subject. A romance develops between Daniel and Moira after he tracks her down, and she begins working closely with H lio, a researcher who is developing a technology by which dreams can be recorded and viewed by others. Meanwhile, protests in Angola revive decades-old tensions and build to a violent attempted coup. While the dense and tangled story, rife with diary entries, recounted personal histories, and thinly drawn tertiary characters, is almost too short for its own good, Agualusa manages to pull off a deeply satisfying ending. Readers not well versed in Angolan history will have a hard time, but those with some familiarity will best appreciate Agualusa's populous, multilayered commentary on the fogs of love and war.
