With her new novel Mercy (“Misericórdia”), Jorge has created a memorial to her mother, who died of Covid in a nursing home in April 2020. However, the novel does not focus on the biographical; instead, it lets the elderly woman, who is called Dona Alberti here, speak for herself by recounting her experiences and thoughts in a diary-like manner into a voice recorder. Dona Alberti, who has poor eyesight and can only do a few things by herself, assesses the circumstances and people around her with great clarity, with warmth, but also with critical distance. She wants to bear witness just as the home, which of all things is called Hotel Paraíso, turns into an isolation ward run by anonymous figures in protective suits. She records what is happening around her and supplements her oral report with short notes that condense individual moments into mental images as in a haiku.
But Dona Alberti is not only someone who receives help and mercy. She is merciful towards us who have failed as a society in the pandemic. She does not accuse, but wrestles with death full of fighting spirit until the end. In this beautiful work that does not gloss over anything, one of those who are otherwise only talked about speaks for herself: the book of the hour.

In Every Sense (“Em Todos os Sentidos”), a collection of forty-one chronicles that Lídia Jorge read over the course of a year on Rádio Pública, Antena 2, there are chronicles that face the fury of the contemporary world head-on, interpreting its challenges, dangers and simulacra with a sharp critical eye. But the singularity of these pages of intervention comes, above all, from the fact that the author is capable of combining on the same stage of reflection critical thought about reality and subjective discourse of intimate memory, together with a deeply felt gaze. Inside this book there are unforgettable pages about human life.

Lídia Jorge’s novel Estuary (“Estuário”) is located in present-day Lisbon. The main character is Edmundo Galeano, the youngest son of a shipowning family. After a wrong investment decision by the eldest brother, their possessions are reduced to a house at the mouth of the Tagus and two ships at anchor costing money instead of generating it. In vain the father writes letters to the relevant minister, who was once the boyfriend of his daughter. Edmundo returned three months ago from a posting with a refugee organization in Africa. He lost part of his right hand in an accident in Kenya’s Dadaab, the continent’s largest refugee camp. He now tries to learn again to write by copying out lines from the “Ode Marítima” by Fernando Pessoa. He is planning a book about the tremendous suffering he has seen in Africa, but his father’s suicide and the bad luck that hits his family redirect his interest to his own world and the familiar people around him. In the end he can only write about them.

Estuary is a book about the vulnerability of a man, a family, a society and the very equilibrium of the Earth. A novel of great poetic power about the urgent questions of our time.

Those We Shall Remember (“Os Memoráveis”) tells the intriguing story of a number of participants in Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974. When the journalist Ana Maria is asked to make a documentary about this historic event for a US TV channel, she returns to her native Lisbon. Looking for more information in her father’s house, who was also a journalist, she finds a photo of some revolutionaries, taken some time after the event. As she discovers, they all have their own stories to tell, and their personal experiences will change Ana Maria’s perception of her country forever. Written with great psychological subtlety and power of language, Os Memoráveis is a fascinating literary contemplation of Portugal’s arduous road to democracy.

The Night of the Singing Women (“A Noite das Mulheres Cantoras”) is written with great psychological subtlety and power of language. The student Solange, a member of an all-girl band, witnesses the charismatic lead singer Gisela pressurising young Madalena because she is pregnant, and then covering up her death. Many years will pass before Solange can face up to these events again – and to Gisela, the woman she admired so much back then.

We Shall Fight the Shadows (“Combateremos a Sombra”) is a courageous and political novel about our times and about Portugal in the era of globalisation. It tells the fascinating story of three months in the life of the psychiatrist Osvaldo Campos. In the night of the 31st December 2000, he runs into Rossiana, an assistant radiologist, who has just seen a drug courier die in her clinic when a package burst inside his intestines. The clinic is clearly working together with the drug smugglers. Because she knows too much, she is to be killed, but can hide in the house where Osvaldo works. A love affair develops between her and the psychiatrist.

The immediacy of these events finally shakes Osvaldo awake, and through his patents’ stories and traumas he uncovers a conspiracy trafficking in drugs and human beings, in which important public figures are implicated. Suddenly, the evil gets too much for him. “Lying is connected with death”, he writes in his notebook. He has to act, so he turns to the press. The novel also passes on a message of hope, despite its bleak view of our present.

In the book, Portugal is subjected to a constant downpour. Bridges collapse and the water takes everything with it, including corpses. This apocalyptic vision reflects that of a depressive country, where lethargy and apathy have spread like the floodwater – where, in the author’s words, “the chemists have sold out of sedatives”. The title Combateremos a sombra puts salt in the wound and is an attempt to stir awareness for the injustices which are all too common in Portugal and around the world. With the narrative force we have come to expect, Lídia Jorge invites us to join her in a gripping reading experience.

The novel The Wind Whistling in the Cranes (“O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas”) was published in 2002 and has been awarded the prize of the Günter Grass Foundation, ALBATROS, in 2006. Grandmother Regina Leandro has fled from hospital and is later found dead in front of the entrance to the old cannery in Valmares. Milene, the grand-daughter who lived with her, is the only one there to organise her funeral; her other relatives are away on holiday. Milene, a rather simple-minded person, now tries to find the right words to describe their grandmother’s death to the relatives. The Leandro family, Milene’s aunts and uncles, belong to the wealthy upper-class. The old factory – founded in 1908 – is meantime being rented and lived in by a large family from Cabo Verde. Milene, totally exhausted by the events surrounding the death of her grandmother and initially speechless, is cordially welcomed into that family and stays with them over night.

Thus The Wind whistling in the Cranes is set in two worlds: on the one hand, the history of the cannery, Milene’s aunts and their husbands and men friends, her cousins, all intent on insuring that their reputation is not tarnished by the lonely death of the old woman. All kinds of interests have to be defended, political and financial. The factory is to be sold; the site close to the beach is ideally located for a modern building project. On the other hand, there is the family from Cabo Verde, the old Ana Mata, her daughters and grand-children. A shy relationship develops between Ana Mata’s widowed but young grand-son Antonio, a crane-driver and father of two children, and Milene. When the Leandros finally discover this, they are horrified.

The atmosphere in the novel is coloured by Milene’s unprejudiced view of the people and the events. Looked upon by her relatives as the poor childish orphan, in the very restrictedness of her small world and in all her innocence Milene displays great human warmth and courage.

In her novel The Painter of Birds (“O Vale da Paixão”), the author again takes her readers back to the world of her childhood. The scenery this time is the old house Valmares, in a village in the south of Portugal. The house is still inhabited by the patriarch, his son and his wife and grandchildren. The other children have left home, emigrated, built up a new life for themselves far away. The decades pass the old house by, and increasingly tourism encroaches upon the rural, isolated life – a sign too of the fundamental changes in Portuguese society over the past fifty years. In the meantime, the granddaughter weaves a dense image based on her memories and full of longing for her real father, who went off and left her mother as a young man, returning only once, when she was fifteen years old. With the story of this loving relationship between father and daughter, an image also emerges of the uncertain destiny of a house, a family, and “a society that neither knows what it is, nor what it should do with its rural past”, as the author once put it in an interview. As a result, much of what is presented in the book seems undecided. Dark gaps remain, full of silence and mystery. Lidia Jorge has again written a novel of melancholic beauty.

The novel The Garden without Limits (“O Jardim sem Limites”) takes place in a big old house somewhere in Lisbon. Julieta Lanuit, her husband and two children own the house and rent the first floor to very different young people. One of them starts narrating the stories of their lives, and like in a puzzle draws a complex picture of their dreams and frustrations, their conformity and revolt, their togetherness and their solitude.

Like many of her generation, the experience of the colonial war was decisive for Lídia Jorge: “The history of this war has yet to be written”, she commented. In her next novel, The Murmuring Coast (“A Costa dos Murmúrios”), she writes about it from the point of view of a woman. Twenty years after a period spent in Moçambique as the young wife of a war-struck officer, the narrator looks back on those months and all their ambiguity, in an attempt to gain some clarity on Africa. Estranged as they are from reality, the colonial lords still preserve their aspirations and notions and imagine themselves to be secure, although the uprising of the suppressed people intimates the approaching loss of their centuries old dominance in Africa. With this novel Lídia Jorge has written one of the most powerful books on the colonial war.