Seven years after ‘Sua Excelência, de Corpo Presente’—his last novel presented in Angola—Pepetela returns to Angolan readers with ‘Tudo Está Ligado’, published by Kacimbo, the publishing house founded and directed by Ondjaki, also an award-winning Angolan author.
“It is a very beautiful book, it has already been released in Portugal. We had the book ready since October, but we didn’t have the financial conditions. 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 the elderly, the instincts of animals—a cat and a dog—and leads us into a story that reaches back to the beginnings of the Kingdom of Tchiaka,” the editor summarized.
The author “transports us to beautiful landscapes, passing through Benguela and Dombe Grande, which the author pursues from memory, gently reinvents, but we also find ourselves near the convictions of a modern woman who seeks to align her emotional priorities with a call from very ancient voices,” he added.
Ondjaki describes the book as a “sinuous novel, where elements of everyday life—the conversation, loneliness, neighbors, old age, moods, tenderness, even eroticism and friendships—are all elevated to a very high literary level, as if in one breath it takes us by the hand, and Benguela and also Pepetela welcome us with open arms.”
This is one of the characteristics of Pepetela’s literature, Ondjaki continued.
“He takes us on a journey, we are swept away by the book, by the stories and characters—and we return different to our daily lives,” concluded the editor.
Pepetela is the pseudonym of Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos, author of iconic novels like ‘Mayombe’, ‘A Geração da Utopia’, and ‘Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto’.
Recognized with the Camões Prize in 1997, he is considered one of the great names in Lusophone literature.
