Seven years after “Sua Excelência, de Corpo Presente” — the last novel he presented in Angola — Pepetela returns to Angolan readers with “Tudo Está Ligado”, published by Kacimbo, a publishing house founded and directed by Ondjaki, also an award-winning national author.
“It’s a very beautiful book, and it’s already out in Portugal. We had the book ready since October, but we didn’t have the financial means. Everything is very complicated in our publishing world,” Ondjaki told Lusa, revealing the challenges the publication faced.
In the new novel, “Pepetela uses the eyes of women and elders, the sense of smell of animals — a cat and a dog — and takes us on a story that goes back to the beginnings of the Kingdom of Tchiaka,” the publisher sums up.
The author “transports us to beautiful landscapes, passing through Benguela, through Dombe Grande, which the author follows from memory, reinvents with gentleness, but we are also close to the convictions of a modern woman who seeks to combine her emotional priorities with a call from very ancient voices,” he added.
Ondjaki describes the book as a “winding novel, where elements of everyday life — conversation, loneliness, neighbors, old age, moods, tenderness, even eroticism and friendships — all of this is elevated to a very high literary level, as if in a breath he took us by the hand and Benguela and also Pepetela welcomed us with open arms.”
This is one of the characteristics of Pepetela’s literature, he continued. “He takes us on a journey, we are carried away by the book, by the stories and the characters — and we return to our daily lives different,” concluded the editor.
Pepetela is the pseudonym of Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos, author of iconic novels such as “Mayombe”, “A Geração da Utopia” and “Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto”.
Recognized with the Camões Prize in 1997, he is considered one of the greatest names in Portuguese-speaking literature.
