Transparent City is written as a series of vignettes into the life of some people inhabiting the Maianga building in the Maiainga district of Luanda in which the protagonist lives, providing perspectives from across ages and experiences as to the current state of the Angolan capital. The characters are described to do whatever it takes in order to survive their lives in the city, such as the Mailman who has been carrying out his duty transmitting letters on foot, while taking care of posting handwritten letters consistently to some government officials to provide him with a moped to help his task, yet to no avail.

Central to the story is a character called Odonato, who lives on the sixth floor of the Maianga building with his wife, Xilisbaba, their daughter, Amarelinha, and Grandma Kunjikise. Ondjaki brings elements of magical realism to his story by making Odonato transparent in the city while searching for his lost son, Ciente-the-Grand, as the city of Luanda becomes unrecognisable. The plot revolves around Odonato’s attempt to locate Ciente-the-Grand, who was shot in the buttock after attempting to rob someone’s house. Odonato seems transparent, his problems of locating his son seem to be minuscule when compared to the problems that the whole Luandans experience in their day-to-day life, even when compared to his fellow Maianga building residents.

In between the main plot, Ondjaki also paints the structural corruption that occurs in Angola following the aftermath of the Angolan Civil War with his various examples, including the attempt by the government to drill oil that is presumed to exist under Luanda’s land despite the numerous populations inhabiting the city. Ondjaki attempts to show the transformation of Angola under the MPLA which is increasingly open to capitalism, presumably by inviting foreign investors to locate oils in Luanda.

At the same time, however, Ondjaki's writing is suffused with a sense of hope and possibility. Despite the challenges facing them, the characters in the novel are resilient and resourceful, finding ways to connect with one another and build a sense of community. Ondjaki's portrayal of this community-building is particularly powerful, as he shows how ordinary people can come together to create a sense of belonging and purpose in even the most difficult of circumstances.

I had this book for a long time on my virtual shelf and finally got around to reading it. The content was new, to say the least!
I chose this book because it was a translated work from a country I had never read anything about or from before. I did not exactly pay attention to what I was going in for. Given some of the imagery and the language, I should have had more problems than I did with this book. There was something so honest about the people and the wild (and at most times, tragic) lives the people within the pages were leading that it was hard not to connect emotionally with the narrative.
In the city, there is one building which has more water than the residents need; a mailman who visits them has his own woes and many more such seemingly small issues. The plotline revolves around the residents and visitors to this particular building but is not limited to just that. I will not go into anything more about what this story is about because it is not about any one thing in particular. We have the poor in a country struggling to make ends meet but still living life to the fullest. They form bonds, help each other and basically - survive.
Corruption is rife in the government bodies. At least here, they are open about it. The one drawback of open corruption is that there is no answer/question that can help an average unconnected individual.
The ending is not concrete, and there are parts that probably have to be taken as metaphorical for the average poor man in Angola. All of this adds up to a very intriguing package with so many things to think about, making it worth the read. I just wish I had gotten to it sooner.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

"Odonato’s chest was agitated as he felt an undeniable yearning for a Luanda that was there without being there, perhaps time had doubled back on itself to make him suffer, the birds of an older Kinaxixi with mannerisms from the Makulusu District sang, invisible, in his semi-transparent ear was it he who was speaking to the city or was it the city of Loanda, Luanda, Luuanda, that was flirting with him?"

Transparent City is Stephen Henignan's translation of Angolan novelist Ondjaki's Os Transparentes. The original was published in 2012 and won the prestiguous José Saramago Literary Prize. The English translation was published in Canada and the US in 2018, and was longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award, and has now been published in the UK by Europa Editions.

This is an exuberant, and yet hard-hitting novel, set in modern-day post-Civil-war Angola, where the ruling left-wing party, the MPLA are increasingly allowing capitalism to run loose:

"Luanda was boiling with people who sold, who bought to sell, who sold themselves to later go out and buy, and people who sold themselves without being able to buy anything"

The novel is centred on the denizens of a tower block in Luanda, with a colourful cast of characters and the story a heady mixture of magic-realism (at one point the authorities decide to cancel a solar-eclipse, first to the amusement of the rest of the world, until the earth's orbit changes as a result), family drama and political satire, comedy mixed with tragedy.

One such character is Seashell Man, who sells shells from the sea shore (I don't think in Portuguese this makes a tongue-twister), adapting his patter to his customers:

"he had them in all colours and styles, for practical purposes or simple adornment, in so many shapes and prices that it was impossible to run into this young man without succumbing to the temptation of keeping a seashell for immediate or future use: to women he spoke softly, to give room to their imagination and needs, to bus conductors he offered seashell pendants they could give to their lovers to hang in their hair, to men he made practical suggestions about how to use them at the office or in their cars, to ambassadors’ wives he presented the seashells as exotic objects that no one would ever think of giving as Christmas presents, to makers of lamps he spoke of the advantages of enormous hollow seashells and of the effect of the light on that marine material, to priests he pointed out the difference they could make to an altar, to old women he recommended them as keepsakes, to young women as original trinkets, to children as toys to make other children jealous, to nuns he sold seashells stuck together in the form of a crucifix, to restaurant owners he sold them as ashtrays or side plates, to seamstresses he emphasized the material’s creative potential and its tinkling sounds, to hairdressers he made clear that beads had already gone out of fashion and, to thieves, Seashell Seller hastily excused himself for the fact that he was carrying nothing more than a bag full of worthless junk."

Others such as Scratch Man (who masquerades as a Colonel in the army when convenient) tell tall tales:

"he paused in his theatrical Luandan manner, the professional pause of any Luandan when he starts to tell a more-or-less true tale, trying to figure out whether anyone present is going to refute him"

But the key character, from whom the novel takes its title, is Odonato, wistful for the old city, and struggling to provide for his family in the new world:

"far off, in that limited far off that Luanda allows, close to the sea walking along the Marginal, allowing the salt from the whitecaps to seep into his skin, Odonato walked around as he hadn’t done for a long time, absorbing the voices and the noises, the honking of car horns and the shouted insults, the finely tuned horizontal beauty of the National Bank of Angola, the smells of Baleizão Square now with no ice cream for sale, the strangely chaotic vision of the ruined buildings beneath the hilltop foundations of the São Miguel Fortress, the bay’s extensive, elongated breadth, like the smile of some Luandan adolescent, the peaceful murmur of the coconut palms that had withstood time and construction on the Marginal’s sidewalks, taking in the spectacle of the modern billboards announcing the latest and most expensive cellphones and jeeps"

And as the novel progresses he gradually turns transparent and lighter (literally floating away at the novel's end):

"first it was my hands, my fingertips... it wasn’t that my body was transparent the way it is and looks now... the beginning my fingers felt lighter... and my stomach aches disappeared...” Odonato turned his hands towards himself and spoke without lifting his gaze from them “a man, when he talks about himself, talks about things from the beginning... like childhood and games, school and girls, the tugas and the independence... and later, something from the more recent past, the lack of decent jobs, about looking so hard and never finding work... a man stops looking and stays at home to think about life and his family, about feeding his family, to avoid spending, he eats less... a man eats less, as if he were a little bird, to give food to his children... and that’s when i got my stomach aches... aches inside me, from seeing that in our cruel times a person who doesn’t have money, doesn’t have a way to eat or take his child to the hospital... and my fingers started to turn transparent... and my veins, and my hands, my feet, my knees... but the hunger started to go away: that’s how i began to accept my transparency, i stopped feeling hungry and felt lighter and lighter... that’s my life..."

Alongside the character's own personal challenges (Odonato's troublemaking son Ciente-the-Grand is shot during a burglary; Mailmam purses a one-man campaign for postal workers to be given mopeds; entrepreneur João Slowly carries out various schemes such as setting up a rooftop cinema and a Church; two brothers This Time and Next Time act as semi-official tax collectors making sure they, and the Government, always get their cut; Little Daddy, a civil-war orphan, looks for his mother via a TV reality show), the novel's plot revolves around the Government's plan to drill for oil under the streets of Luanda, with predictably catastrophic results, which are previewed in the novel's opening pages.

"whichever way you looked at it, the night was braided blackness and enclosure, the hide of a nocturnal beast oozing sludge from its body, there was a timid gleam of stars in the sky, the languor of certain whitecaps and the seashells on the sand popping open in an excess of heat, human bodies undergoing involuntary cremation and the city, sleepwalking, wept without the consolation of moonlight"

An excellent novel and a strong contender for the 2022 International Booker.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC