Gut-wrenching and bizarre in equal measure, Transparent City is a masterful and experimental piece of fiction providing striking insight into Angola’s capital, Luanda. One of the book’s key strengths lies in its liquid relationship to reality: it moves through realist, comic and surrealist elements with seeming ease, reflecting the many tenors of city life by frequently switching between and blending these tones.
Much of the book bears testament to deeply saddening realities in Luandan life. The city’s officials spend the majority of the book seeking to appropriate as many of their citizens’ resources as possible rather than assuring the necessaries for Luanda. Sometimes the self-engorgement of the authorities is juxtaposed with the poverty of the people whom they are meant to serve. While consuming the steak and fries which Odonato has given in exchange for seeing his ailing son, a policeman notes how severely underweight Odonato is: ‘Agent Belo chewed with satisfaction, “just look at you, comrade.”’
Odonato initially stopped eating in order to feed his children, however his body shrinks as the situation in Luanda worsens, and he comes to represent the tribulations facing the underclass of Angola. ‘“We aren’t transparent because we don’t eat,”’ Odonato says, ‘“we’re transparent because we’re poor.”’ Ultimately, Odonato’s and João Slowly’s sons die from state neglect, through lack of medical intervention and insufficient police protection from gang violence.
It is when he hears of his son’s death that Odonato shrivels to the point of transparency, hovering in the air like a ghost. Surrealism thus expresses a pain so acute that it cannot be contained in real terms. When Luanda is set on fire due to the Party’s careless mining of oil beneath the city, Odonato sets himself loose and floats away over the transparent city. The final scene is thus personally and collectively apocalyptic: Odonato has lost his own son, however he also signifies a broader categorisation of pain experienced by a people exploited and abandoned by their corrupt government.
Nonetheless, perhaps the future is less bleak than it might first appear for the inhabitants of the book. Having begun with a fire, Transparent City has come full circle, and this time it is definable, described by the Seashell Seller as ‘”lazy red”‘. Even as it consumes the city, the fire somehow becomes more manageable through this categorisation. By rising above the flames, Odonato holds within him the potential for Luanda’s rebirth, and some of us are left with a sense that Odonato’s neighbours will rise from the ashes of their burning city.