Some time ago I was sent The Einstein Enigma to review. Various circumstances conspired against me so that the book sat for too long on my desk. Time seemed to be against me. Finally however the universe brought me full circle, cleared the way and I found myself embarking on one of the most fascinating stories I have ever read.

The Einstein Enigma was written by José Rodrigues Dos Santos, a familiar face on Portuguese television. Born in Mozambique, the son of a doctor, José was brought face to face with the horrors of war from an early age. This was to shape his life as he became a prize winning  journalist specialising in war reporting. He is also a journalism professor at Lisbon University.

Having covered real life stories in places such as Iraq, Israel, East Timor and Lebonon, José has a rich tapestry of experience to draw upon. Apparently he never intended to become a novelist. His first novel was born from a friend asking him to write a short story for a literary magazine. Two hundred pages into his ‘short story’, José realised he had the writing bug and become a best selling novelist. To date he has published 9 novels, selling over a million copies in Portugal alone and has been translated into 17 languages. He remains the main anchorman at RTP presenting the evening news and reporting on wars across the world.

Reading the back cover of the book, I realised that my interest was already piqued not only because the author hails from Portugal but also because the subject matter in itself was fascinating. I had no idea however, how rich and complex the book would become or the profound material it contains.

Essentially the story centres around a university professor who specialises in cryptography named Thomas Noronha. The hero finds himself drawn into international espionage, at the mercy of the CIA and the Iranian government who are battling to decode a message written by Einstein that they believe contains the instructions to make an atomic weapon. In way over his head, Thomas falls for a beautiful woman from Iran who may or may not be all she seems and finds himself trapped in a nightmare of conspiracy and subterfuge.

The novel starts out as a thriller, akin in pace to the novels of Dan Brown but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s an easy read. Interspersed between the action are long passages which begin to explain the intricate workings of quantum physics and mathematics. Thomas is searching for ‘The God Formula’ – the enigmatic mystery that proves the existance of God. Using real,cutting edge scientific research, José begins to weave a fascinating story that both educates and fascinates.

Whilst the premise is fictional, the story is based heavily in fact as experiment upon experiment is referenced along with teachings ranging across philosophy, history and religion. The greatest minds are drawn into the arguments and the reader is gently asked to stretch their mind as they read. The riddle that Thomas has to unravel becomes the readers riddle as slowly we begin to explore what we really believe when it comes to the big questions. José is not afraid to ask the biggest of them all:-

Why are we here?
What came before the universe?
How will the universe end?
Is the universe eternal?
Does God exist?
What exactly is God?
How can we prove God exists?

This isn’t a religious novel by any means, simply a profound knitting together of religious and scientific thought that makes you question everything you believed and then some whether you are an aetheist or a believer.

In some ways it could be argued that the characters are a little superfluous to the novel, merely there to carry the reader on a journey. Yet whilst the characters are not necessarily fleshed out, there are beautiful moments of humanity, moments that tug at the heartstrings and that we can all relate to. There is a love story, there is the cruel passage of time that destroys those we love.

Away from formulas and equations, the novel serves also as a travelogue taking us to places that many of us perhaps have never visited and never will. We travel through enigmatic Coimbra the academic capital of Portugal, through Iran and Tibet. With each journey we are treated to delicious descriptions of the place concerned with vivid, evocative language that cannot help but stir the travellers toes. Historical facts abound such as the Portuguese were the first western people to reach inner Tibet.

This isn’t a book to read at night. I quickly learned that it needed to be read with pen and paper at the ready to write notes. It’s a novel to be read in daylight because otherwise you will find your mind ticking over the profound facts found within it’s pages in the midde of the night. Thankfully, José provides us with a reading list at the end upon which he based his novel. All of these books are now in my wish list.

I’m not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination. I was good at maths but prefered English, I love astronomy but I became an astrologer. Semantics call me more than reductionism (those terms are explained in the novel!). Yet I am called to ask the big questions. As a child I tried to write a story about a man who had reached the edge of the universe and I remember the frustration at not being able to imagine what he found there. In many ways I’m still travelling this eternal line, peeking into the void beyond. This novel for me is a speck of light on the horizon, dawning realisation that everything truly is connected.

I will leave you with a rather beautiful passage in the book

“Everything was serene, translucent, lofty. Truly pure. Never had he felt so perfectly between heaven and earth, floating above the fog, his spirit free, standing out among the mass of humanity to touch God, eternity compressed into a second, the ephemeral stretching into the infinite, Alpha, the start and Omega, the end, light and darkness, the universe in a puff, the impression that life is mystical, that a mystery lies hidden behind the visible, an enigma engraved in old writing, an inscrutable code, an ancient sound that can be sensed but not heard.
The secret of the world “

The author’s official website is found here

I was recently contacted by one of the organisers of the DISQUIET Literary Program due to be held in Lisbon next year. I am delighted to share their information regarding the event on In Love With Lisbon. This sounds to me like a terrific initiative. The atmosphere in Lisbon certainly stirs the writer within and Portugal has a wonderful history of writing talent.

Please find the press release below.

Two weeks of writing workshops and lectures and discussions on the craft of writing and Portuguese literature and culture with some of North America’s and Portugal’s finest writers, including:

Kim Addonizio
José Eduardo Agualusa
António Lobo Antunes
Junot Diaz
Brian Evenson
Nick Flynn
Frank X. Gaspar
Valter Hugo Mãe
Horacio Castellanos Moya
Josip Novakovich
José Luis Peixoto
Jacinto Lucas Pires
Patrícia Portela
Miguel Real
Patricia Reis
Luis de Sousa
Gonçalo M. Tavares
Richard Zenith
…and many others TBA

Study writing and Portuguese Literature and Culture in a unique context in one of the most mesmerizing cities in the world. Lectures in Portuguese Literature & Culture will focus on famous Lusophone literary figures as well as contemporary writing and intersections between Lusophone and Anglophone literature. Workshops in Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Photography, and Writing the Luso Experience. Literary walks and tours by scholars, writers, and translators will introduce participants to the essential literary Lisbon, the City of Poets and Sailors.

Four full scholarships are available for writers and scholars of Lusophone descent, funded by the Fundação Luso-Americana. Winners will attend the ILP in 2011 in Frank Gaspar’s workshop Writing the Luso Experience. Submit: A 250-word statement about your background and what the scholarship would mean to you, and a maximum ten-page writing sample in any genre (poetry, fiction, creative/literary nonfiction, scholarly work). Deadline Jan. 31, 2011. Reading fee $20USD. See website for more details.

Writers may also enter the contest for the International Literature Award: The charge went that contemporary North American literature is too insular, that it doesn’t engage the outside world or speak to global concerns. The charge has some truth to it, and in response Dzanc Books requests your best writing with an international aspect, that somehow or other broadens the landscape of North American literature outside of the borders of North America. The winner of this multi-genre contest wins airfare, accommodations, and tuition to the ILP in Lisbon plus publication in TBA. Deadline Jan. 31, 2011. Reading fee $15USD. Entries accepted from the US and Canada in English.

For more info see the website Dzanc Books ; the Facebook group  ; or email .

Dzanc Books partners with Centro Nacional de Cultura, Fundação Luso-Americana, CETAPS-FCSH (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies) Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and Universidade de Lisboa in the DISQUIET ILP.

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Some months ago I was delighted to receive a review copy of The Moon Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon. Now, as an astrologer with a rather obvious passion for Portugal there perhaps could not be a more suitable book for me!

The summer disappeared in a haze of studying and an insane days filled with hours of over-time, squeezing in my Portuguese studies where I could. I have had little time to take in my own surrounding let alone travel. I miss Lisbon like a desperate child lost in a giant supermarket. I want to go home but I can’t! I feel like stamping my feet but I must wait, be sensible, and focus on developing a career that means I can work from anywhere to the march of my own drum. But Lisbon calls to me through the pictures on my walls, through the voice of a special Portuguese someone, through Madredeus and Fado, through the gorgeous David Fonseca and endless poetry. And more recently still my two selves have begun to merge in discovering Pessoa was a highly skilled astrologer himself…

But I digress. The Moon Come to Earth was born from a series of Dispatches from Lisbon which Philip Graham first published on the internet. A published writer and a university lecturer, Philip has a yearning for Portugal which I recognise as a kindred spirit. Having spent years living in Africa, he is a seasoned traveller with a keen eye for detail.

I can honestly say I was hooked from the first page. The author brings Lisbon and Portugal to life in his pages. I was suddenly roaming the mosaic streets with him, transported to my soul-home in a mere glance from the author’s eye. I was there on Rossio, walking in the leafy shade in Principe Real. I laughed at his hilarious descriptions of difficult moments and was touched by his openess as he lets us in to see the world through his sometimes fallible eyes. We learn what it is really like to be a stranger in a strange land that curiously feels like home.

I loved the description of  his brave fight to learn Portuguese as his daughter effortlessly absorbs it as a youngster does: his love – hate relationship with the swallowing of vowels and the sea like oosh…oosh..of spoken European Portuguese.

“It’s actually this confounded swallowing that creates the wave of sound I love, the words melting their discrete borders into a collective enterprise that rises amd falls together, like the houses dotting the hills of Lisbon’.

Philip paints a vivid picture of Portugal and the Portuguese culture from one who truly respects it. He describes the quiet passion of the Portuguese people, their love of festivals and football and the huge pride in national writers. We are treated to lines from Pessoa and Saramago (with whom he recounts a slightly icy meeting) and gently guided through a history of the Portugal and its flourishing from Cape Verde to politics, through fado to the quiet revolution. Whilst the book is quite short, there is a wealth of material to start your own Portuguese odyssey.

I don’t want to give anything away but suffice is to say that towards the end of the book there is a denouement that I never saw coming and which savagely pulled at my heartstrings. Because woven within the pages, within the swallowed vowels and billions of calçada stones, in the lines between Saramago and Pessoa, hanging in the scent of galão and pasteis; there is a very human story. This is not just an embellished travel journey, this is a story of one family and their fierce and delicate love for each other. Philip is not shy to admit his struggles as well as his victories. He is a writer with a keenly perceptive eye for detail and he is not afraid to turn that eye upon himself, to see himself in black and white and every shade of grey as we humans are. I’m not afraid to say the book moved me to tears as well as laughter.

I’ve often felt that you cannot learn the word ‘saudade’ without eventually coming to live the true meaning of it. It’s as though it is not a word to be simply spoken, it must be lived through all it’s bewitching sorrow and aching hope. It’s as though the word has a spirit of its own that comes to greet you as you whisper ‘saudade’.

It whispers back  “Dance with me a while and you shall know me”.

I know I danced and so it seems, did Philip Graham and his family.

Philip Graham’s Website

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&nou=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=inlovewithlisbon-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&asins=0226305155