First published 2021
James Hannaham boards a plane from Cape Verde to Lisbon in early 2017, carrying a translation of Fernando Pessoa's poetry. Trump has just won the presidency, and thoughts of unfit leaders occupy his mind. He opens the book to find a poem about tending sheep the narrator never kept. The coincidence strikes him as profound given Portugal's role in starting colonialism and the slave trade. Pessoa himself created seventy-five fictional personas, each with distinct voices and styles. Once in Lisbon, Hannaham begins responding to each poem he reads in whatever form feels right. His fascination with a television show called Air Disasters, which dramatizes plane crashes, merges with his literary project. The city's textures and geometric patterns seep into his work. Through memes, fiction fragments, aphorisms, screenshots, and lyrical passages, Hannaham constructs a shape-shifting meditation on identity and survival. The book becomes his attempt to understand how the self holds together when it exists in multiple fragments, performs different roles, and faces constant threats of dissolution.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, adventure, contemporary, 21st-century, aviation
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Cape Verde, Lisbon, Portugal
Period: 2017
208 pages · Hardcover · Soft Skull