"As mulheres do meu pai", un road movie de José Eduardo Agualusa

Abstract

“As mulheres do meu pai”, the sixth novel by the Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, published in 2007, narrates two journeys that happen simultaneously and which are intertwined: the leading character’s trip, Laurentina, that treads the paths taken by Faustino Manso, her recently unveiled biological father; and the narrator’s trip, a writer who is invited to create a script to a film, that dreams and outlines Laurentina’s trip; a fictional remaking by Agualusa’s own trip to Southern Africa. More than an example of travel literature, this work aims to bring the literary work closer to the cinematographic genre of road movie, highlighting one more strategy of the author, already well known for textual strategies such as characters survival, metafiction and Angolan history’s factual elements adjustments. To do so, we base this work, mainly, in Umberto Eco’s studies about “woods of fiction”; Shuichi Kato’s research about notion of time and space; and Linda Hutcheon’s about metafiction and adaptability; furthermore, there are interviews and journalistic articles that help our understanding of its symbolic narrative construction.