Transparent City

rdf:langString Transparent City

rdf:langString Transparent City

rdf:langString Transparent City

rdf:langString Angola

rdf:langString Romance

rdf:langString Portuguese

rdf:langString Print

rdf:langString Transparent City (Portuguese: Os Transparentes) is a romance novel by Angolan writer Ondjaki published in 2012 by . It won the José Saramago Literary Prize in 2013. The book was translated into English in 2018 by Stephen Henighan under Biblioasis Publishing. It is written as a series of vignettes into the life of the many people who inhabit the Maianga building (a residential building in the Maiainga district of Luanda) in which the protagonist lives, providing perspectives from across age and experience as to the current state of a degraded and modern Luanda. A common thread tying many of these stories together is that the characters are doing what they can to survive in a broken city. This is shown throughout novel but specifically in this moment: Luanda was boiling with people who sold, who bought to sell, who sold themselves to later go out and buy, and people who sold themselves without being able to buy anything. The aftermath of the Angolan Civil War is present throughout the entirety of the work, as Odonato bemoans the fallen state of Luanda after the war that overthrew the prior socialist government. This cultural trauma is shown throughout the book's writing: «The war», it was said, «is a bleeding memory, and at any moment you open your mouth, or gesticulate, and what comes out is an incarnate trace of things you didn't know you knew» all Angolans had, therefore, some paranoia with weapons or armaments, all had a story to tell or an episode to invent Breaking up the narrative sections, there are single black pages with white text, including lines from author's notes, various character's recordings, and even "the voice of the people."