Perhaps There is a Light Inside People
When I lived in Lisbon I exchanged a few e-mails with the writer José Luís Peixoto, but somehow we never managed to meet; my loss, particularly since it has taken me a couple of years to read his marvelous novel The Implacable Order of Things, which won the José Saramago Prize in 2001.
The novel is set in the farmland of Portugal’s Alentejo region, a world of low sloping hills, cork and olive trees, golden wheat fields, and a relentless heat that Peixoto captures here nicely: “The earth was its own silence on fire. The sun was a blazing heat lighting up the flame-colored air: the aura of a fire that was the aura of the earth, that was the light and the sun.”
It’s a world where “swallows fly close to the ground, like harmless volleys from a slingshot,” and where characters can live well past 100 years, as if baked into a sort of semi-immortal beef jerky by the Alentejo’s ever-present sun. Peixoto further peoples his novel with Siamese twins who are joined at the pinky, a brutal giant, a scheming sheepdog, a man with no right arm or leg who somehow manages as the town’s premier carpenter, a cook who sculpts her meals into elaborate landscapes, and an oracular voice locked in a hallway chest that seems to hypnotize some of the characters with pronouncements like “Perhaps there’s a light inside people, perhaps a clarity; perhaps people aren’t made of darkness, perhaps certainties are a breeze inside people, and perhaps people are the certainties they possess.”
These individual certainties, though, are almost never shared by the characters, who are unable to breach their invisible interior walls, and this lack of connection sets in place turns of fate that continue in the novel through not one but two generations.
Translated by Richard Zenith into a beautiful English that often rises to the rhythms of a desperate prayer, this novel’s accumulation of wisdoms lingers in my mind, particularly this hard truth: “We are granted our heart’s desire only for it to be definitively taken away, since our dream of it perishes.”
While I was reading Peixoto’s novel, I discovered by chance a Portuguese band that I have to confess to my shame I’d never noticed when living in Lisbon, A Naifa. Now I can’t stop listening to their music. They combine the traditions of fado with a contemporary, at times almost ambient rock sound, a strange brooding mixture of past and present. In many ways, the songs of their album “3 minutos antes de a maré encher” became the soundtrack for me of The Implacable Order of Things.
One of my favorite A Naifa songs is their heartbreaking “Todo o amor do mundo não foi suficiente” (“All the Love in the World Wasn’t Enough”). This video of the song is especially moving since it records one of the band’s last performances with their bassist, João Aguardela, who died too young of cancer in January 2009. Rest in peace, João.
*
And here’s a strange note: when I finally met up with José Peixoto, at the Disquiet International Literary Conference in Lisbon, he told me that he had written the lyrics for A Naifa’s song “Todo o amor do undo não suficiente.”
Interested in more of Peixoto’s work? Read about his travel experiences in North Korea, in the post “The Kinship of Secrets.”
Tagged with: A Naifa • Alentejo • João Aguardela • José Luís Peixoto • Portugal • Portuguese literature • Portuguese music • The Implacable Order of Things • translator Richard ZenithRecent Entries
- May 2023
- March 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- December 2021
- October 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- September 2020
- August 2020
- January 2020
- August 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- September 2018
- June 2018
- April 2018
- October 2017
- May 2017
- March 2017
- January 2017
- November 2016
- September 2016
- January 2016
- October 2015
- August 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- November 2014
- August 2014
- May 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- August 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- March 2013
- December 2012
- July 2012
- May 2012
- March 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
Blogroll
- 3bute
- 3quarksdaily
- 99% Invisible
- A Newbie's Guide to Publishing
- A Space for Image
- Adam Deutsch
- Alma Gottlieb
- American Nyckelharpa Association
- Asymptote
- Best in Portugal
- Brevity
- Cabaret Mechanical Theatre
- Caipirinha Lounge
- CinemaDivina
- Cooper Dillon Books
- Critical Mass
- Defunct Magazine
- Dispatches from Stay More
- Dzanc Books
- Emergency
- Fiction Writers Review
- Flavorwire
- Guernica
- HTMLGIANT
- Hunger Mountain
- identitytheory
- In Love with Lisbon
- Ivebeenreadinglately
- John Bresland Video Essays
- John Martyn
- Leite's Culinaria
- Like Fire
- McSweeney's Internet Tendency
- Mira's List
- Miriam's Well
- Moving to Portugal
- Mundo Pessoa
- My American Meltingpot
- NewPages Blog
- Ninth Letter
- Numero Cinq
- Oi Musica
- Open Letters Monthly
- Os Tempos Que Correm
- Patagonian Road
- Portuguese American Journal
- Powerhouse Arena
- Practicing Writing
- Quarterly Conversation
- Remembering English
- Richard Hoffman blog
- Rigmarole
- Rui Zink versos livro
- Sahelsounds
- shadowbox
- Significant Objects
- Songlines
- Spiritual Crossroads
- St. Petersburg Review
- The Alchemist's Kitchen
- The Book Bench
- The Brink of Something Else
- The Common
- The Education of Oronte Churm
- The Literary Saloon
- The Millions
- The Morning News
- The Mouth of the River
- The Rumpus
- The World's Fair
- The Writer and the Wanderer
- things magazine
- Three Percent
- Times Literary Supplement
- Tywkiwdbi
- Words without Borders
- Write the Book
- Writer Abroad
- Young and Hip
It’s very good to see/ find by hazard a portuguese music’s lover… a Portugal’s fan…
Hugs from Portugal! 🙂
Obrigado!
You might also enjoy this article I wrote on the subject, “The Pleasures of Saudade,” which includes videos and MP3s of recent Portuguese music:
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/opinions/the_pleasures_of_saudade.php
Com amizade, Philip