Germano Almeida

When Napumoceno da Silva Araújo dies, he leaves a 387-page will. Not because he has that many things to will - he just decided to write his memoir in the will. And as the laws of Cabo Verde require the will to be read in full, everyone needs to listen to his life story. This will is the base of the novel but the author decides to use it creatively - we get parts of it but we also get additional parts of the story and sometimes a different viewpoint to what the document narrates.

At the show more start of the novel we learn that the expected heir, his nephew Carlos, is not really the heir - Napumoceno has an illegitimate daughter and he uses the will to announce that to the world. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that we are dealing with an unreliable narrator in pretty much any point of the story (multiple narrators, never separated cleanly - even the excerpts from documents are not clearly marked). But every additional page brings new details, often contradicting what we think we know. Some of these details come from the detailed notebooks which the deceased wrote and the daughter found; some come from the memories of the still living people.

By the end of the story, the facade of the respected Senhor da Silva Araújo had cracked irreparably. What people thought of him, what he believed about himself and what the reality had been cannot be reconciled. The reader is left to decide in some places what the truth actually is and in other places, there is no way to read the story without seeing evil in it (even if some of the still living insist that this is not the case).

The writing is a bit convoluted (not just because of the selected style of not marking the narrator) and often circles around. But it does paint the story of a country that is almost unknown - Napumoceno dies in 1984 (the novel is published in Portuguese in 1989) and his will had been last updated in 1974, the year before Cabo Verde's independence. That allows us a glimpse into these days and the life in ex-colony - both immediately before it became independent and a few years after that. It verges on the farcical in some places and remains painfully mundane in others - and I wish the balance was actually a bit better between these moments.

Overall, an interesting book mainly because of where it is set and where the author is from. show less

Upstanding citizen, entrepreneur, most serious Senor da Silva has passed away, but at the reading of his will, there are eye-opening news about his life for both his nephew and for the other people of the island. Wonderfully told story about how a seemingly stuffy patriarch had both an inner emotional life and a checkered past that nobody had suspected. A story told in reverse that reverses all expectations. A little dry, but quite beautiful.

I originally thought this book was a mildly humorous story revealing the true nature of the deceased, which was so different than how he saw himself. I was bothered by his decision to hate his nephew mostly based on reasons he conjured in his own mind, when his nephew most likely made the ungrateful old man wealthy.

I had to force myself to keep reading after Sr. Araújo raped his housekeeper and thus beget his daughter. No way around it, he raped her. When asked about it after he’d died, show more she said she wanted it. But that’s not how it was depicted when it happened. In fact, I rather despise the author for making this excuse later in the book. The man was a self-important, despicable, ungrateful character who used women repeatedly for his own gratification. show less

This languorous short novel could be titled 'A Trader's Life in Retrospect'-- Senhor Araujo's will plays only a tiny role in this recounting of the events of his life. A 'hick' from a smaller island replanted in Cape Verde's small footprint off the coast of West Africa, Araujo lucks into momentum as a trader, then importer and exporter. His life is explained by his main servant/major domo, his nephew and business successor, and his heiress through her posthumous research. A languid pace is show more peppered with intriguing drama and unexpected relations. A relaxing weekend read that requires patience, feeling, perhaps some tea. show less