The Society of Reluctant Dreamers

by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Splitting through the clear waters beside the rainbow hotel, Daniel Benchimol finds a waterproof mango-yellow camera and uncovers the photographed reveries of a famous Mozambican artist, Moira. In this exquisite new novel, Agualusa's reader loses all sense of reality.

In The Society of Reluctant Dreamers, Daniel dreams of Julio Cortázar in the form of an ancient giant cedar, his friend Hossi transforming into a dark crow, and most often of the Cotton-Candy-Hair-Woman, Moira, staring right back at him. After emails back-and-forth, Moira and Daniel meet, and Daniel becomes involved in a mysterious project with a Brazilian neuroscientist, who's creating a machine to photograph people's dreams. Set against the dense web of Angola's political history, Daniel crosses the hazy border between dream and reality, sleepwalking towards a twisted and entirely strange present.

Release date: March 10, 2020

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 300

Sample

2
Let us picture an amphitheater. A hall sloping down toward a stage of dark
waxed wood, framed by a heavy scarlet curtain. A woman, totally naked, is playing
piano, while parakeets flutter all around her.
I’m seated, also naked, in the back rows, right up near the top, and I’m watching
the concert through tear-filled eyes. I don’t know the pianist personally, but
I know everything about her. An old man, seated to my left, wearing a brilliant
admiral’s uniform, whispers in my ear:
“That woman’s a fraud!”
I restrain myself so as not to hit him. I’ve never heard such beautiful music
in my whole life. Besides, I feel a deep admiration for that woman. I know she’s
been arrested, tortured, she’s survived a tumor and a cruel, violent husband, who
forbade her from pursuing a musical career. After she was widowed, she went
back to the piano. She established a neo-pagan church, The Cult of the Goddess,
which accepts only women. In her concerts, she usually has herself accompanied
by animals, the parakeets I saw there but also dogs and even wolves. Sometimes
she fires a pistol up into the air, using real bullets, to the annoyance of the owners
of the halls.
A dream. I woke up with it on the morning of the day I got divorced. I recalled
some fragments the following morning, while I was swimming back to land with
the camera attached to my right wrist. The dark stage, the naked woman, with
her shriveled breasts hanging down over her belly. I often dream about people I’ve
never met. Sometimes I dream the whole of these people’s lives, from their births
all the way to their deaths. At the end of the concert I walked down to the stage
to congratulate the woman. She hugged me tenderly and said:
“Everything passes, my friend. Time covers the world in rust. Everything that
shines, everything that is light, will soon be ash and nothing.”
“Almost everything is ash already,” I answered. “They’ve incinerated my past.”
At the moment when I awoke, the conversation made no sense. By the end
of the day, when I had come back from the courthouse, it did. These kinds of
conversations often happen in my dreams – implausible, mysterious, affected,
even ridiculous. Later, though, they attain an unexpected coherence. Sometimes,
I dream loose lines of verse. I also dream interviews. I’ve interviewed Jonas Savimbi
four times: twice awake and twice in dreams. Muammar Gaddafi I’ve only
interviewed in dreams. He told me his last days had been terrible. He’d slept in
abandoned houses, fleeing his pursuers, trying to reach the village where he’d been
born. Planes dropped bombs on the column he was traveling in and he found
himself forced to get out of the car and take shelter in a drain. When I interviewed
him, Gaddafi was in the drain, bent double, pressed against the cement, wearing
a khaki shirt and with a black cap on his head. The following morning, I woke up,
turned on the television and saw him with his head uncovered, hair in disarray,
his face covered in blood, and a look of dazed surprise, astonishment, his delicate
hands trying to brush away the hard blows he was receiving.
“God is great! God is great!” his killers were shouting. I felt sorry for him. I felt
even sorrier for God.
In the interviews I’ve done in my dreams, the interviewees have often proved
more authentic, and especially more lucid, than when I’ve been alert. Others,
however, make use of mysterious languages of which I’m only able to guess at
fragments. Julio Cortázar, for example, a writer with whom I’m not even particularly
well acquainted, appeared to me in the form of an ancient giant cedar, with a
twisted trunk and crinkled leaves. He answered my questions by moving clouds in
the sky. The clouds were a kind of alphabet, the sky a blank page. I remember that
dream because seated in a straw chair, in the shade of Cortázar, ramrod straight
and very remote, was the Candy-Hair-Woman. The Cotton-Candy-Hair-Woman
appeared in my dreams often. She was tall and elegant and almost always wore the
colorful fabrics of our local bessangana women. A long, angular face, interesting
without being beautiful, and a quindumba hairstyle that was very tall and soft, and
copper-colored. The Cotton-Candy-Hair-Woman waited for Cortázar to leave the
clouds at peace and then said:
“I once met a man who was dreamed by the sea.”