A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

A darkness, thick and burbling, like a river, spilled down over the windowpanes. Suddenly a great flash lit everything up, and the woman saw her own shadow thrown against the wall. The thunderclap reverberated a second later. She shut her eyes. If she died there, like this, in that lucid moment, while out there the sky was dancing, triumphant and free, that would be good. Decades would go by before anyone found her. She thought about Aveiro, and realized that she had stopped feeling Portuguese. She didn't belong to anywhere. Over there, where she had been born, it was cold. She saw them again, the narrow streets, people walking, heads down, against the wind and their own weariness. Nobody was waiting for her. 

Ludovica, Ludo, is afraid of the outside world, and with good reason. One day, as gunfire and rockets break out in Luanda, the capital of Angola where she lives, her sister and her sister's husband leave and never return. The country has gained its independence, but at the cost of a deadly civil war that rages right under her window. So bricks herself into the apartment. She survives by killing and eating the pigeons and monkeys that land on her balcony, and burning her books one by one. She has a little balcony garden that provides her with vegetables, and she becomes skilled at hooking her neighbor's chickens with looped ropes from several stories up. Below her, Angola grows up, but it's a process in which she's too afraid to take part. As her books burn, she writes her story--for whom?--on her walls in charcoal.

Ludo is the center of Jose Eduardo Agualusa's A General Theory of Oblivion, but only the center. Though she's hidden away in her secret chamber, she becomes enmeshed with dozens of characters who live outside. She stops herself from killing a pigeon because she sees that it's carrying a message between lovers. She spares it, and places a couple of diamonds--of no value to her, and perhaps a great danger--in its beak. The diamonds enrich a political prisoner who buys the apartment next to Ludo's, becoming her unwitting neighbor. The message turns out to have been intended for the brutal commandant who tortured him. Slowly, these and other characters, whose connections to one another are just as absurd, begin to converge on Ludo's hidden apartment. Soon, they're all there at once, including a journalist who investigates strange disappearances, a mute communist leader, and a young boy who has found his way into Ludo's company, giving her a much needed companion and himself freedom from the demands of the street gangs.

It's silly, but it works. The image we're left with is of people who ought to be, and in some cases are, bitter enemies, drawn together by hyperactive happenstance. What emerges, perhaps, is an image of a country as a network of interpersonal relations. All these characters, Black African and Portuguese, rich and poor, communist and right-wing, are ineluctably drawn together despite themselves. Their relatedness is, on a plot level, an absurd bit of near-magical realism, but on a symbolic level, they represent something larger than their own ideological, racial, and class divisions. Which is not to say they all are reconciled, but merely that this network of relations encompasses and precedes them in ways they are not fully conscious of. By the time Ludo emerges into this new Angola, three decades have passed. War is over, but its scars remain. Still, there's a hopefulness in the way the book ends, with the bricks coming down and the world entering at last.

With the addition of Angola, my "Countries Read" list is at 106!