PAWA Book-of-the-Week: ‘Transparent City’ by Ondjaki

By Editor

‘TRANSPARENT City’ is a novel by an Angola writer, Ndalu de Almeida, who writes under the pen name Ondjaki. Originally written in Portuguese, the book was translated into English by Stephen Henighan. Despite ‘Transparent City’s focus on a community slipping down a precipice and toward urban demise, Ondjaki’s prose pulses with life.
In the hours before a cataclysmic fire and a historic eclipse, a politically estranged father scours the underbelly of Luanda, Angola, for his mortally wounded son. The trajectory of Ondjaki’s authorial eye could easily run the risk of minimizing the weight of figures, yet his emphasis on mundane interactions and their conversational subtleties ensures the novel’s gravity.
Ondjaki is a versatile young talent and a most promising writer of the Portuguese language in Africa. His books, which have won several international literary prizes, have been translated into seven international languages.

• *Every week, Pan-African Writers Association (PAWA) will have its Book-of-the-Week from any country and a writer of its choice featured here to give readers a sense of the publishing scene across Africa