A General Theory of Oblivion

Luanda on the eve of independence and through the long civil war that follows. A frightened Portuguese woman bricks up her apartment in a grand central building and lives walled in for nearly thirty years, growing food on the terrace while the city churns below. The map holds the old downtown, the bayfront Marginal, the water of the bay and the musseques that ring the city.

Ludovica

Ludo's building, the Prédio dos Invejados

1975

On the eve of independence the narrator, a fearful Portuguese woman, seals the entrance to her top-floor apartment with a wall of bricks and stays shut in for close to thirty years. The building sits in the smart heart of colonial Luanda, the kind of address left half-empty as settlers fled in 1975.

Opening chapters

inspired by The Prédio dos Invejados is an invented name and the building is not a real named address; Agualusa sets it in an elegant apartment block in central Luanda, so this marks a representative point in the Ingombota downtown where such a building would stand.

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