Roman “Lunch on Sunday” – remember without regrets

“Lunch on Sunday” – already the title of the 2021 novel (original: “Almoço de Domingo”) by José Luís Peixoto evokes calm, stop, return. At least if you don’t think of a bratwurst on the amateur football field. The novel from Portuguese translated the experienced Austrian translator Ilse Dick, not only a Peixoto expert, but also able to skillfully rhythmize the language that is constantly developing. And indeed: contemplation and memory are mode and object of the novel.

Peixoto has presented a literary biography of Manuel Rui Azinhais Nabeiro. In this, the very productive narrator, whose works have been translated into more than 20 languages, is not about tracing the life story of one of the most legendary entrepreneurs in Portugal chronologically. The secret protagonist of the novel is the memory herself – its peculiarity, her peculiarity as a connector of the past and lived presence, her meaning as a creator of what constructs identity and justifies the value of life.

The career of Rui Nabeiro is a variant of the classic narrative of the Selfmadem, the man from a simple background, which has developed great prosperity. Rui Nabeiro was born in 1931 in the small town of Campo Maior on the Spanish border as the son of a greengrocer, and his father ran a small coffee roaster. During the Spanish Civil War from 1936, the area became a lively coverage for smuggling goods.

At the age of 19, Rui Nabeiro, who had only attended school until fourth grade, took over the management of the family business. Based on the family cosmos of values, in which respect, consideration and honesty are said to have been fixed stars, he expanded the company under the name Delta as the largest coffee roaster of the Iberian peninsula, finally into a global trading group whose trademarks were fair trade relationships and wage policy. A few days before his 92nd birthday died Rui Nabeiro 2023.

Contemplation and memory are mode and object of the novel.

The work biography, the Rui Nabeiros career path, but also its suitability as a contemporary witness of a Portuguese century, which comprises the Second World War, the fascist dictatorship and the climbing revolution as well as the leap in Portugal in modernity, would be more than enough for an epic narrative of the country’s history in the mirror of the Exemple, such as Nino Hartischwili worked out for Georgia has. And yet the material, the material history, takes a back seat in Peixoto’s narrative.

The memory novel includes a told time of only three days in March 2021, the days before the 90th birthday of Rui Nabeiros. During these days, by the filter of memory of the jubilee, Peixoto gives an insight into his life, less as a sequence of events, rather as a condensate of what has been experienced, born as the resulting relationship of the relationship of the reflection, born from the inspiration of the specific moment. They are smells, tastes, light reflexes, tiny déjà vu experiences that cause flashbacks into the past and motivate the old patriarchs for grateful reflection and review.

Peixoto draws a quiet and beautifully read image of the successful life of a man who appreciates himself happily and with the reading what the root of his – and perhaps even general of – happiness is: love. Love as solidarity, support, fulfillment, as a band between one another passionately loving, siblings and the generations.

Peixoto has succeeded in a round and extremely edifying memory novel. The fact that the big breaks of the 20th century only pass as a daydreaming backdrop, appear here and there when blinking into the light of the silly silling sun to stay stages on a long successful life. The material, political and psychological implications of fascism and revolution, for example, should have been examined for the inclined interest. Especially since Peixoto calls up a contemporary witness, which as an entrepreneur also heard politically and from whose life story could you have learned a lot about the social constitution of work. A little more bratwurst instead of stealing, matter instead of meditation, a Sunday idea would have been worth, so to speak. And the too frequent use of the progressively as a course form is unpleasant in Dicks.

The German philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze once was amazed at the “general envy of every present against their future”, so this life and work biography, which was so successful in retrospect, can certainly experience the envy of the present constructed in the story. In the world of all hopes, this is almost too beautiful in the world of 21 century crisis -like late capitalism of the 21st century to be true. Nevertheless: With a really beautiful Sunday reading in the Unironian sense, we always have to do.

José Luís Peixoto: Lunch on Sunday. A. d. Portug. v. Ilse thick. Septime, 240 pages, born, with dust jacket, 26 €.