Literature: “I am me and Salazar can be me”

How do you talk about “normal” life? How do you ensure that the reader continues reading a novel whose story, in its normality, even banality, could also be his own, and does not put it aside in boredom? “I am me and Salazar can be me,” it says at the beginning of the novel “Eliete. “Normal Life” by Dulce Maria Cardoso. »A dictator rules Portugal for almost half a century, almost another fifty years pass since his death, and then he appears in my life. Suddenly it was as if he had always been here, taking care of everything. I couldn’t allow that.”

But then Salazar disappears and only appears again later. But the reader is involuntarily drawn further into the “normal” life of Cardoso’s narrator Eliete, which is also announced in the title. She lives near Lisbon with her husband Jorge, a computer specialist, and their two daughters. The daughters are teenagers and still go to school. She herself works in a real estate company. From the outside, everything seems to be fine.

But Jorge is no longer interested in Eliete. They still sleep together, but more out of habit than passion. She suffers from the lack of attention. Her daughters are also increasingly distancing themselves from her and want to have less and less to do with her. The fact that she signs up for Tinder has less to do with the anonymous sex that the app offers and more to do with the effort the men make for her when they meet in a motel. But then her grandmother, who had temporarily lived with Eliete because of her dementia, moves into a small retirement home and Duarte, the son of the home’s owners, falls in love with her.

Eliete is a woman in crisis. In flashbacks, the reader learns about her childhood, in which she grew up with her mother in cramped conditions with her grandmother. Her father died early in a car accident. The mother now has her own apartment, but Eliete avoids it because it contains everything “that I didn’t want to be and, ironically, what I had become.” Through precise observations and intelligent comments from her narrator, Cardoso makes Eliete’s “normal” life interesting. The sober look that her narrator casts on her fellow human beings and herself is never entirely without empathy and avoids clichés and flat accusations. The power of men and the past is present, but without Eliete deceiving herself about her own contribution to her misery.

It is her grandmother’s empty apartment where Eliete and Duarte secretly meet. She doesn’t even tell her best friend Milena about it. Milena is a good-looking, successful lawyer in Lisbon and lives alone. The men she is with always disappear from her life after a while. Eliete envies her courage and determination. But if she were to tell her about Tinder and Duarte, she would have lost “the only advantage I had over the fighting and victorious Milena,” namely her family, which appeared intact on the outside: “If I didn’t maintain at least one advantage over her , that meant I had failed at everything.”

Dulce Maria Cardoso succeeds in portraying the “normal life” of a woman in today’s Portugal in an exciting and interesting way. It is a novel that narratively elevates individual problems to a general level, making them interesting and exciting for everyone. A novel that doesn’t resolve contradictions, but leaves them standing so that you can form your own judgment. At the end, Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, reappears, beyond the cliché of power and evil. This is not the only reason why one is excited about the continuation of Eliete’s story, which Cardoso announces on the last page.

Dulce Maria Cardoso: Das normale Leben. A. d. Portuguese in. Steven Uhly,‎ Secession-Verlag, 280 S., geb., €24.