Book Review: Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho transl. by Margaret Jull Costa

 

The women in Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judith de Carvalho - translated from Portuguese into English by Margaret Jull Costa - are monomanically obsessed by men. They can live without them, but rarely without thinking about them in the most mind intrusive ways.

For ten years Dora, which we are lately shared that she is now in her late 30s, mourned her husband. A man without ambitions, lacking anything special. ´Duarte-who-has no-vocation- for - engineering - but but what did Duarte have a vocation for?´ Left with a 7 years old daughter and no money, she had to luck to find a well paid job that will allow her to pay for the daughter education and a decent life for herself. She keps mourning. The husband of her mother-in-law, Ana, is tied to bed. Ana´s sister is hysterically living in her mind over and over again her only relationship, long time ago, with a man who left her. And there is the storyteller, Manuela, a woman whose man left her for Dora´s young daughter. Duarte himself wanted to leave Dora for another woman, shortly before he died. 

What for me was even heavier than all this emptiness of betrayal is the weight of age. The perception of women as having a very very limited availability. After their 30s, they feel like objects, reanimated sometimes, only for a very short time. Society, themselves, other women, may easily consider their age as the main reason of the end of them. 

Maria Judite de Carvalho is considered one of Portugal´s most popular authors, but Empty Wardrobes is her first translation from Portuguese. She lived between 1921 and 1998 and the novel was written in 1966 therefore it may explain the exhausting outline of age as it belonged to a mindset typical for those times. 

The author gives voice to all those perception. Strong women voices, in their passive acceptance of their volatile destiny. I may confess that after reading the book, I felt that there is nothing really to appreciate in the book, and I did not have any empathy for any of the characters. However, a couple of hours later I ended up in a more considerate tone for the construction of the story - the harmony between the multiplicity of voice and the progressive build up of the story. And I even figured up those women, young widows or broken hearted women mourning their solitude. 

While liking a book or not is a pure matter of taste, the literary brain may leave space to the full appreciation of an excellent writing. I could have read in the original Portuguese but was hurrying up too much to read the English translation. Maybe my next book by Maria Judite de Carvalho will be in original.

Rating: 3 stars