City of Ulysses

by Teolinda Gersao, Jethro Soutar (Translator), Annie McDermott (Translator)

Overview

A man and a woman meet in Lisbon and fall in love. City of Ulysses is their story, and the city's love story besides. It is a story that leads readers down multiple paths, through myth and history, reality and fantasy, literature and the visual arts, the past and the present, male and female relations, the crisis of civilisation and the need to reimagine the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943150175
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	06/23/2017
Series:	Portuguese Literature
Pages:	163
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Teolinda Gersão was born in Coimbra, Portugal, and has lived in Germany, São Paulo, and Mozambique. She is the author of sixteenth books, novels and short story collections, translated into twelve languages. She was awarded the Pen Club Prize for the Novel twice in 1981 and 1989, the Grand Prix for the Novel by the Portuguese Writers' Association in 1995, the Fiction Prize of the ICLA (International Critics' Literary Association) in 1995 and the Portuguese Writers' Association's Grand Prix for the Short Story in 2001, the Literary Prize of the Inês de Castro Foundation in 2008 and the Prize for Novel António Quadros in 2012.

Jethro Soutar is a translator of Portuguese and Spanish. His translation of By Night The Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was shortlisted for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. He recently founded Ragpicker Press and co-edited its debut title, The Football Crónicas, a collection of Latin American narrative non-fiction.

Annie McDermott translates fiction and poetry from Spanish and Portuguese, and her work has appeared in publications such as Granta, World Literature Today, Asymptote, The Missing Slate, and Two Lines. She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, Brazil, and is now based in London.

Editorial Reviews

"The quiet echoes of moments from The Odyssey, as when Paulo casts Cecília in the role of Nausicaa, are just right … Gersão deserves a wider audience in English.” — Kirkus Reviews

"This story is, of course, a love story but one that cleverly intertwines with that love affair the idea of art and what it is, and the idea of a city, a city unknown to all too many people and a city, that like most cities, has parts which are unknown to many of its inhabitants. Unlike most cities this is the City of Ulysses, not, as he stresses, Joyce’s Ulysses but Homer’s." — The Modern Novel

From the Publisher

2017-05-02
An elegant paean to love—and to "the least known of all European capital cities," Lisbon.By Portuguese novelist Gersão's account, speaking through her many-flawed hero, Paulo Vaz, "for millions of perfectly well-informed people across the globe, Portugal barely existed: at most, it was a narrow strip of land tacked onto the side of Spain." She does much here to make the country and the city come into a life of specific detail: how the sunlight glints, how spring arrives to the soft green trees on the Avenida da Liberdade, how a crumpled-up T-shirt bearing the slogan "Lisbon is for lovers" looks when covered with "salt and boat oil." Gersão's central theme, though, is the impermanence of love. Though a sensitive artist, so sensitive that he bears his supportive mother's last name and not his indifferent father's, Paulo is a bit of a noodge: "Don't expect too much from me, Cecília," he says, in an internal monologue addressed to a long-departed lover. "I'm a free-spirit, or unreliable, if you prefer." Cecília, African born, is a colonial come back to help remake Portugal after the fall of the dictators 40-odd years ago; also an artist, she is the always present object of the dejected Paulo's obsession: "Having gone in search of Lisbon with you," he laments, "I must now go in search of us, look at us. From very close quarters." Like an unfunny refraction of Woody Allen's Manhattan, with Paulo as Isaac, Gersão's novel is a celebration of setting; the story, a touch tiresome owing to Paulo's nonstop mope, gives way to the loveliness of place. The quiet echoes of moments from The Odyssey, as when Paulo casts Cecília in the role of Nausicaa, are just right, too. Readers planning a trip to Portugal will find this a fine, revealing complement to their guidebook—and on the evidence of this book, Gersão deserves a wider audience in English.

Kirkus Reviews