Tavares, Gonçalo M
Entry updated 23 February 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1970- ) Angola-born teacher and author, in Portugal from the age of eighteen, active from around 2000. Much of his work presents variously framed exemplary narratives whose protagonists – whether imagined or fantasticated from real figures like Italo Calvino, whose influence upon Tavares is palpable – are described with porcelain clarity, though their actions may only be understood as expressing sometimes literally geographical searches for meaning via the tools of Fantastika. Two narratives, each conflations of the picaresque and the nostos [see Mysterious Stranger], have been translated into English: Uma Viagem à Índia: Melancolia contemporânea (2010; trans Rhett McNeil as Voyage to India: Contemporary Melancholy 2016) and Uma Menina està Perdida no seu Século à Procura do Pai (2014; trans Daniel Hahn as A Girl Is Lost in her Century, Looking for her Father 2025).
These hopscotch tales culminate in O Fim dos Estados Unidos da América: Epopeia ["The End of the United States of America: An Epic"] (2025), an immense Alternate History whose Jonbar Point is the sudden spread across America of a Pandemic which, allegorically, afflicts only the poor. Among the figures who traverse the ravaged continent can be discerned mythopoeic entities from the Western cauldron of story, including Jocasta and Tiresias, though the main absorber of this world in turmoil is Leopold Bloom from James Joyce's Ulysses (1922); Bloom also appears in Voyage to India. As with an author like Olga Tokarczuk, Tavares displays, in various modes, an intensely contemporary take on the twenty-first century world: including some sense that the civilizational detritus seeming to choke that world must be scavenged to be understood. [JC]
Gonçalo Manuel de Albuquerque Tavares
born Luanda, Portuguese West Africa [now Republic of Angola]: August 1970
works (highly selected)
- Jerusalem (New York: Random House Books for Younger Readers, 2009) [trans possibly from manuscript: pb/]
- Uma Viagem à Índia: Melancolia contemporânea (Lisbon, Portugal: Editorial Caminho, 2010) [hb/nonpictorial]
- Voyage to India: Contemporary Melancholy (Dalkey Archive Press, 2016) [trans by Rhett McNeil of the above: pb/]
- The Neighborhood (Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 2012) [coll of linked stories: trans from various iterations of author's O Bairra ["Neighbourhood"] sequence 2002-2010: illus/hb/Rachel Caiano]
- Uma Menina està Perdida no seu Século à Procura do Pai (2014)
- A Girl Is Lost in her Century, Looking for her Father (Dallas, Texas: Deep Vellum Press, 2025) [trans by Daniel Hahn of the above: pb/]
- O Fim dos Estados Unidos da América: Epopeia ["The End of the United States of America: An Epic"] (Lisbon, Portugal: Relógio d'Água, 2025) [book-length poem: hb/]
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