Sunday book pick: Dreams of freedom in ‘The Society of Reluctant Dreamers’ by José Eduardo Agualusa

“How can you be scared of a regime that trembles when seven young people with absolutely no power raise their voices?”

There are two types of dreams – private and fleeting, disappearing at the first brushes with consciousness, and the shared, long-held kind that, with luck, metamorphoses into reality.

The Society of Reluctant Dreamers by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, excavates dreams and prophecies – shared and private – to reveal the earnest desire for fairness and justice. Agualusa examines this possibility in Angola, especially among the youth, who are sensitive to the deep class differences and the social divides that allow corruption, degeneracy, and violence to thrive.

Promises of liberation

The narrator, Daniel Benchimol, a journalist who writes about culture and interviews artists who are “foreigners or live abroad”, is a man caught between a sour marriage and commitment to personal freedom. His marriage to the daughter of one of Angola’s most prominent and wealthiest individuals comes to an end when his father-in-law offers to pay him to give up an honest journalist’s job. Daniel’s daughter, Karinguiri, despite being born in a privileged bubble and strictly away from Angola’s destitution, grows up to be sympathetic to the poor...

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