Ondjaki's TRANSPARENT CITY (Tr Stephen Henighan)

Admit it: you've been waiting your entire long, lonely, colorless life to read a novel that contains a line of dialogue as brilliantly bizarre-yet-perfectly-contextual as "these are difficult times for sorcerer roosters."

Satisfaction is just a few clicks away. Hurry up and get yourself some format of Angolan novelist Ondjaki's incredible Transparent City, which I caught myself explaining to my mom as "Ulysses with less stream-of-consciousness and more characters but also imagine if they discovered oil under the slums of Dublin and the Chinese were the economic powerhouse of the day."*

The "sorcerer rooster," by the way, is largely unremarkable except it recently lost an eye when, preparing to do his job and start the day with a mighty crow, he was instead struck in the eye by a stone shot from a great height by a young man in the multistorey apartment building next door -- which building is almost a character in itself, as is an albino cockroach that keeps appearing and stealing scenes -- one morning in 21st century Angola. 

The rooster is no more a sorcerer than any other urban bird; he is just referred to as one by a pair of suspicious tax inspectors struggling to make sense of the aforementioned building and its inhabitants, which, get ready for the inhabitants, most of whom sport incredible names like Ciente-the-Grand and Strong Maria and Little Daddy and João Slowly. And our sort-of protagonist, Odonato, which is very close to the insect order Odonata (which includes dragonflies and damselflies and is evolutionarily quite ancient even for insects), derived from the Greek word for "tooth, " and someday is really like to have a look at the original Portuguese text of this novel to see if all the character-names-as- English-words are original to that text or translated from the Portuguese words, and if so why Stephen Henighan left Odonato** alone instead of calling him "Dragonfly" or "Tooth." But that's a project for long winter months instead of brief summer ones.

Odonato is the father of Ciente-the-Grand, and has already begun (but barely) to become the literally transparent man he will be by novel's end when his wayward son gets himself shot in the ass and wanted by the authorities, which sets in motion the incredible mutual aid showcase that is the building most of these characters call home. They have worked out elaborate warning systems to alert one another of any government or other unwanted attention they're getting, have worked out schedules for exploiting the weird pools of water that collect in the first floor hallway (possibly due to deferred maintenance on the city's water systems, but maybe also a feature the building's residents created for themselves. Or both. I'm inclined to say both)***, and are in general very much entangled in one another's lives to a degree we mostly associate with extended families and I had to keep reminding myself that for most of human history this was the default setting for humanity -- mutuality and cooperation whenever possible, competition only when absolutely necessary -- while I caught myself regarding these relationships that pretty much amount to found family, with wistful awe.

As you see from these international book covers, the city is only part of the title in the English language editions, and is thus singular. For once, though, I think I like the English/ American title better; the plural in the romance languages (including the original Portuguese) would more directly translate as something like "The Transparents" as in, perhaps, the transparent people, but making it a singular/collective noun phrase and extending it as a description of the city of Luanda entire, it draws our focus to how most of the many foreign visitors drawn into the story of Odonato's building and its inhabitants must view the city: the petroleum engineers and other consultants brought in by the government to complete plans to exploit the oil that's been discovered literally under the city, for instance, seem to look right through its buildings, its infrastructure, its people (and of course a lot of the oil is under the Angolan equivalent of the famous Brazilian favelas). Even its local officials seem to have shifted to this perspective; those who aren't busy entertaining visiting American geologists are working to capitalize on another, more fleeting and ephemeral natural resource their country has to offer in the form of a coming solar eclipse, which will be total in Angola. As a Wyoming girl, still living in a place that is functionally also a resource colony with delusions of sovereignty that also, just a few years ago, cashed in on eclipse mania, I felt a kinship with the characters in The Transparent City and their ambivalence about the coming opportunities (a homeowner in Wyoming's capital city for many years, and a former journalist who covered the mineral extraction industries, I was always extra wary after learning that I did not own the mineral rights to my own property and that this is standard out here. Meaning of course that if oil, natural gas, etc were ever discovered in my neighborhood there would be swift eminent domain action and I would have to just hope that I'd be offered something reasonable in exchange. These characters, though, in Odonato's building... are they renting tenants? Co-operative owners? Squatters? It's never addressed.).

Ultimately this, like so many good literary novels, is a story of relationships, not so much between family members for all of the Odonato/Ciente plot as between friends, neighbors who have become friends, and yes, a few romantic relationships, such as the long marriages between Odonato and Xilisbaba and between their neighbors Edu (who has a formidable and world famous hernia swelling right next to a testicle that he carries around a little stool to support whenever he gets to sit down) and Nga Nelucha, between the entrepreneurial Joao Slowly and the actually hard-working Strong Maria, and the supportive appreciation the entire building extends toward a character known only as The Mailman, whose only wish in life is to be issued a moped with which to make his rounds delivering the city's mail but who can't even get home anymore because a huge and sprawling unauthorized garbage dump now blocks all access to his house so he sleeps... we don't know where he sleeps. Too, the figure known as Little Daddy, who was separated from his mother in the most recent interlude of  Angola's civil war and who is hoping that an upcoming TV appareance will help reunite them. Little Daddy just sort of crashes at the apartment building and maintains goodwill with its official residence and sort of earns his keep by doing any and all odd jobs that need doing, is a lens though which we see a huge variety of tendernesses and neighborly acts of good old fashioned kindness. It's all rather deftly sketched through us in Ondjaki/Henighan's understated style but we get to know everybody well enough to know them as distinct characters and to weep along with them and their friends when a few meet ignominious fates.

About that style, though: if you're not used to, say, Portuguese literary fiction and yes I'm mostly thinking of Jose Saramago here (and hey, this book was awarded the Jose Saramago Prize!), it might take you a while to get used to this text, in which there are phrases and phrases that feel like they could be sentences in that they contain subjects and predicates but are neither capitalized at the beginning nor punctuated at the end with periods, to say nothing of spoken dialogue, which mostly just appears amidst narrative lines, set apart at best with an em-dash. It's not at all good English literary prose like we're taught to respect and to try to produce in school, but its effective and evokes the way real conversations happen and real thoughts occur and real events unfold without resorting to the stream of consciousness text that makes, say, Ulysses so challenging for so many.

I have a lot of candidates for "my very best read of 2023" already as I've no doubt shown in this blog, but were I to explicitly list them all, Transparent City would be one of them, and were I to make a short list it would probably be on that as well, though the year is not yet half-over. The next time you want to feel something from a read, you could do a hell of a lot worse than get your mitts on this, or, I suspect, anything else of Ondjaki's. I'll be looking for more of his work sometime soon.

*This is not to disparage Ulysses,  especially not so close to Bloomsday, which I always devote to enjoying that book on audio, but a) Ulysses is on my mind because it is almost Bloomsday and b) I've had more than one person tell me, in my lifetime, that they like the grand tour of Dublin life James Joyce shared with the world but would prefer it without all the interiority and linguistic pyrotechnics. To which a legit reply might be, "then don't read Joyce, read, say, Edward Rutherford instead" but whatever. You do you. 

**Though I can certainly see why Odonato's wife, Xilisbaba, is left alone in this regard. What even is that name, though an exceptional name it is to be sure! I thought, of course, of the Mayan underworld, Xibalba upon first encountering this name but that's as close as I could get on this one. 

***At first this just sounds like an unfortunate puddle from leaking plumbing that has been neglected and allowed to accumulate a bit but this actually turns out to be at least deep enough to soak in like a hot springs and several scenes take place here with residents of the building and their guests soaking and socializing and affirming belief in the healing or restorative powers of the building's waters. And then the tax inspectors behold it and...