In this strange and meandering tale, translated from the Portuguese, it appears that Violeta, drinking, and driving in an appalling storm, has been involved in a serious car crash. Off the empty road, trapped and hanging by her seatbelt, she will be erratically recapping her life in the immediate, and not so recent, past. Finally rescued, it will appear that she dies in the crash. But the wider story is very much her thoughts. But it is a jumble of images, family, friends, colleagues and life – that in retrospect one has to wonder if how much, or if any of it is true. Throughout the book we get the “immediate” thoughts, but gradually by gradually more and more of her back life is revealed. But can that mean that her possible "truths" of the people around her become more visible, or is that maybe questionable?
A theme that runs through her thoughts is that she has just sold her old family home. This might be in response to her daughter (she is unmarried) planning to leave home. Although she is deeply embedded in the memories of her family she claims not to like the house, but it had become a place of comfort to her daughter who had often visited there as a child. So selling might be regarded as malicious. But this too reflects the ambiguity of her thoughts. Has she really sold the house recently, meaning that she must have held onto it for years, in spite of her vaunted dislike, or is this yet another delusion?
Gradually too the possible stories of her parents will emerge. She lived in a family of great bitterness and obvious discord where a public front was maintained. Her father from a poor farming family and her mother from one of greater wealth and seeming respectability. We are told her father had become a partial recluse after he had been threatened by a crowd in the civil war. He had been identified by somebody as worth of attack, but the family story is that his wife courageously stood the possible attackers down. With time for Violeta it might become clear why he was in this difficulty, an illegitimate son (and a parallel life to his marriage) that would be kept from her as a child. The son and his place in her father’s life, and later hers too, will become an obsession of Violeta.
But her tale as she tells it is one of almost complete discontent, and ultimately contempt for other people. She creates complicated lives for them that have to be fictional. Meanwhile she will be trying to maintain that she is normal, hardworking, not obese, and achieving things. Even the simplest incidents of her past life become long recounting of minutiae. But as the book progresses the reader has to wonder how much is true, how much is delusional, and how much is perhaps an inadequate woman trying to explain away situations in which she is clearly struggling – situations in which she “speaks a completely different language” to other people.
But maybe bizarrely this makes the novel a strangely compelling one, although mightily strange in tenor. It is a unique way of considering the nature of truth as we understand it, but also the deeper truths and memories of family. The latter is something we all have and we surely know that various members see things from different perspectives and regard some things as large, as or more significant than others. But the distance of Violeta from reality and the created ambience of distanced stupor equally asks whether one should believe anything she does say, hint or feel.

Unfortunately Dulce Maria Cardoso's Violeta among the Stars was a rare DNF for me. I couldn't get on with the premise, the style or the story.

I picked up this book as the title intrigued me and also because the author has been described as one of Portugal’s greatest living writers.

Violeta has overturned her car and as her life hangs in the balance, all of her memories come flooding back, some recent in the lead up to the crash and some not so recent, from when she was much younger. All culminating in her realisation of her troubled life and far too late she realises she did have a choice after all.

It is told in the first-person with a pressing stream of consciousness that at times has you feeling sorry for Violeta and at other times getting angry and wanting to scream at her.

It took me a while to get into the book and in the first part of the book I found the writing style quite confusing. I persevered but was still struggling to work out who, what, why and when at times.

Thank you to Netgalley and Quercus for an e ARC of Violeta among the stars in return for an honest review.

Pressing stream of consciousness that makes you hold your breath throughout the book - Violeta, an overweight sales rep, sees her life in front of her when she crashes her car. A distant mother, a crazy father, a daughter that doesn't get along with her. Not sure whether to be angry with Violeta or sad!

I picked up this book because it reminded me of the premise of *10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World*, which was one of my favorite reads of 2020. Violeta has overturned her car and her life flashes before her eyes as she meditates on her complicated relationships with others and with her own body. It is told in a first person perspective stream of consciousness style. I think if I had known it was going to be stream of consciousness, I would not have chosen to read it.

I could not get into the first third of this book and found the writing style incredibly confusing, so by the time I got to the meat of the book, I was entirely confused about who was who and what was happening. This book was not for me, at least not right now. I might give it another try in the future.