Books

Mathematical theory teaches us that every sudden and devastating event, which we call a catastrophe, is nothing more than the product of countless small past transformations, and that all forms and beings, which we consider fixed and permanent in time, are the result of unpredictable past variations.

Set between Lisbon and Cascais in the 1990s and early 2000s, with occasional forays into the Portuguese Colonial Wars in the 70s and Euro Disney, Teoria das Catastrofes Elementares is a novel in fragments, a stained glass window of memories, traumas and identities.

Thirty-three short, interconnected chapters told through the same narrative voice, depict the struggles and challenges that shape the narrator’s character throughout her lifetime. Simultaneously a portrait emerges of a middle-class family, representative of a society at a specific point in time: Lisbon in the 90s and early 2000s.

We meet the main character, Vera, through different stages of her life: as a five-year-old child in a financially struggling household, during adolescence where a hereditary mental health illness drives her and her sister Sofia apart, and as an adult, married and mother of two, while researching through files her great-grandfather’s role as a governor in colonial Mozambique…

With humour and irony she revisits the sad, comical, tragic and everyday episodes that make up the experiences of the various generations of a family while revisiting the Portugal’s recent history.