• The Society of Reluctant Dreamers
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Archipelago Books

The Society of Reluctant Dreamers

The Society of Reluctant Dreamers

by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

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José Eduardo Agualusa's restless protagonist, Daniel Benchimol, spends his dreaming hours interviewing revolutionaries and writers. In this treacherous sleepscape, we find the Angolan anti-communist Jonas Savimbi, Muammar Gaddafi, hunched and hiding in a gutter, and Julio Cortázar as a great billowing tree, speaking to Daniel through an alphabet of clouds. He dreams wild dreams of people he's never met, squinting at them as if submerged in the hazy waters of southern Angola.

When Daniel finds a camera on the beach, he becomes obsessed with the woman in the photos. Moira is a Mozambican artist with a similar preoccupation with her subconscious life – she stages her dreams in her artwork. The two meet, and together they explore the cloudy edges of their nightly visions, tugging at the fringed hem of the real. The Society of Reluctant Dreamers is a delicately crafted glimpse into the aftermath of Angolan independence, a postcard sent to prod the illusion of peace and freedom.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810489
Pages: 272
Publication Date:

Praise

False memories and clairvoyant dreams combine in Agualusa’s sweeping, intricately plotted tale of personal and political history in Angola . . . While the dense and tangled story, rife with diary entries, recounted personal histories, and thinly drawn tertiary characters, is almost too short for its own good, Agualusa manages to pull off a deeply satisfying ending . . . (a) populous, multilayered commentary on the fogs of love and war.
—Publishers Weekly

I loved one of the author’s previous novels so much that the idea of skipping this one . . . was inconceivable . . . Agualusa’s prose, as translated by Daniel Hahn from the Portuguese, is wry and lucid and weird . . . Read if you like: Roberto Bolaño, the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, Phil Klay, traveling alone, the simulation hypothesis.
—Molly Young, New York Times Book Review

The dreams that Agualusa weaves throughout A Society of Reluctant Dreamers are more than just introspective fantasies; they are a reflection of a timeless worldly conscience, a nagging need for societal change that makes its way around the world . . . [Agualusa] proves that turning dreams into memories is a powerful way to start a revolution.
—Cam Lind, Full Stop

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