‘Now and at the Hour of Our Death’

Posted 6/2/16

Susan Moreira Marques by Hugh Gilmore The single most beautiful, inspiring, touching, and moving book I have read this year is set in Portugal. I’ve been wanting to recommend it in this column …

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‘Now and at the Hour of Our Death’

Posted
Susan Moreira Marques Susan Moreira Marques

by Hugh Gilmore

The single most beautiful, inspiring, touching, and moving book I have read this year is set in Portugal. I’ve been wanting to recommend it in this column since I first read it in January but feared I would not be able to do justice to its simple beauty.

One is sometimes tempted to recommend a book the way one would a newly discovered medicine or religion. News of this miracle must be shared. The world must be told. Merely praising it, or suggesting that others read it, would not convey how profoundly beautiful this book is.

The subject, however, is somewhat off-putting when first mentioned: a journalist accompanies a palliative care team and comes back to tell us what she has seen and felt. Compounding this difficulty, the book is set in a foreign country whose language few among us speak.

After all, in this Disneyesque Trump ‘n’ Clinton America of goaded hate and phony optimism, who might be attracted to a book set in a corner of northern Portugal called Trás-os-Montes, “a rural area the young have abandoned”? Or the book’s title: “Now and at the Hour of Our Death” (2015).

The author is Susana Moreira Marques, now a Lisbon journalist. And her book has been exquisitely translated by Julia Sanches for the publisher & Other Stories, a new press from London.

The stimulus for this book arose in 2009 when the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation launched a home palliative care project in the Planalto Mirandês, in Trás-os-Montes, a remote region in northeast Portugal. Doctors, nurses and other health professionals traveled from village to village, helping patients of varying social classes and age groups. Their aim was to help them live the end of their lives in as much comfort as possible and to die, in company, at home. Susana Moreira Marques visited this project and the people described in the book several times between June and October 2011.

The resultant book is about those people and their lives, as lived when Moreira Marques was there and as her subjects remembered. It is a work of respectful sociology. One critic called it “an extended meditation.” Others have called it “genre-busting.” It reads at times like a poem, at others like a series of brief reveries. The author hardly presents herself as a character, though she produces crisp, insightful asides or summaries to events. Sometimes she even feels emotions. You want to thank her when you finish reading her book. And offer her a cup of tea on a quiet veranda.

This is not a tale of heroic medics, or intrepid journalists. It is about the people that the palliative care team and the journalist have come to serve. Cases are not considered, nor are alternative diagnoses offered. Descriptions are not offered of hovering doctors and nurses trying to save these simple mountain folk. The book is about how people go about the philosophical and physical business of living their lives with one foot in this world and one foot out. And while they do this, a pair of watching eyes notices what it is like for them. Sees both the small details and the larger truths.

The structure of this 128-page nonfiction book is unusual. The first 40 pages are composed of brief scenes, some only a line, some a paragraph, others a page or two. They are full of psychological ellipses that engage the mind and make you provide the continuity of the author’s themes. Each clip has the feel of poetry or poetic wisdom. In fact, I am somewhat startled whenever I read this section. It feels like Shakespeare: fresh, startling, wise and stimulating. The book is worth recommending for the writing alone.

After that first section, the rest of the book is given over to a handful of extended stories of specific people. They speak for themselves. Their wants and satisfactions and hopes emerge as though told by a person waking from a remarkable dream. Whether the author ingeniously devised this structure, or simply turned over her (highly polished) notes, I cannot tell. It works though.

This writer, Susana Moreira Marques, is remarkably daring in her ability to set a scene. Any good student of journalism can offer the reader details, but only the great ones choose the details that speak for themselves. Being observant in the finest sense is to bring insight to a scene. And the magic of her writing lies in offering us truths that seem beautiful.

First time through, I was so moved by this book’s style and wisdom I could only read a page or two ¬– in truth, sometimes only a golden paragraph – a day. I savored it the way one would read the ancient reflections of saints or prophets back from the desert with truths we should know.

The book is pagan in some ways, poetic in others, and neither sympathetic nor judgmental, having the objectivity an angel must have when looking at earth.

Hugh Gilmore has written several novels and a memoir, “My Three Suicides: A Success Story” that are available both in paperback and e-book formats.

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