Bedraggling Grandma With Russian Snow

Translated from the Portuguese by João Reis

2022 Longlist

Bedraggling Grandma is a book of precision taken to torturous limits of hilarity. Sure a woman has been murdered and the eye witness is a talking, thinking, reading stuffed donkey, but it is not entirely absurd, for it suggests a number of human truths like a short electric cut though Wittgenstein, who plays a role in the novel that begins with the sheer absurd and ends with a more elevated absurd, you odd and Cartesian human reader.

A book that can be read in one sitting, it is also a book that you will read at least three times if you do race through it in a sitting. Perhaps you should read it standing. Standing and leaning? Well, that would allow some leg flexing, yes. But isn’t your concentration more sharp if you are sitting? And though your legs stretch less, is the trade-off between less stretching worth it for the rest they have in not supporting your body?

About the Author/Translator

João Reis, born in 1985, is a Portuguese writer and a literary translator of Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic). He studied philosophy and has lived in Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and the UK. Reis’s work has already been compared to that of Hamsun and Kafka, and represents a literary style unseen in contemporary Portuguese writing.

Librarian’s Comments

“This is a humble and emotional novel about the power of memory and generosity, which narrates a grandson’s journey through hope, from Canada to Mexico, to find the possibility of a happy ending.
Written from the perspective of a child, Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow is a book made of the courage and fascination that childhood is dressed.
João Reis masterfully employs in this novel the absurd, but at the same time throws at the reader the sense of great tenderness that the image of an Old Russian grandma pelted by snow, without memory, generates on the readers hearts. Porto Municipal Libraries, Portugal