The stranger in Luandino Vieira’s literary writing: an analysis of the book O livro dos rios

Abstract

This article refers to the book O livro dos Rios by the Angolan writer Jose Luandino Vieira, published in 2006. The novel tells the story of Kapapa, who became Kene Vua during the guerrilla war and is again Kapapa. The character narrator recounts his memories of traumas and war from his childhood to adulthood, through the course of the waters of the Angolan rivers, which become secondary charactersof history. In addition, the individual memories of the character intertwine with the collective memories of his country. The storyteller’s way of telling, through the water metaphor and the recreated language, fits the narrative of the novel into the aesthetic of the stranger proposed by Sigmund Freud, in his work The Stranger, when referring to a new way of thinking aesthetics. The waters participate in the narration of the novel. The character narrator blends languages and uses neologisms to tellabout the unspeakable experience of war and violence. The research proposes to analyze the elements within the scope of the stranger present in the book The bookof rivers, studying the narrative and the form of account of the narrator.