THE PORTUGUESE WITNESS
by John Reidy
A debut novel offers a tale of adventure and family spanning centuries in Portugal.
The opening of Reidy’s work focuses on Paulo Henrique de Silva Barros. Readers meet him in his 40s and then see his childhood, which starts in tragedy: His mother dies giving birth to him. The story then proceeds through his idyllic early years in the Estremadura region of Portugal as the son of a bank manager. Paulo’s courtship of Adrianna is likewise picture perfect until she’s killed in a car accident, devastating both her own family and his. Moving on with his life, Paulo becomes a project manager for an architectural firm based in Boston. He soon establishes his own firm in Lisbon, a short distance from his Estremadura birthplace, where he’s recently received an unexpected inheritance from his grandfather. The author prefaces the story of the rise of Paulo’s business with an episode set centuries earlier, in C.E. 410, that tells the tale of a man named Claudio Bracarri. Claudio is a landowner in the north of the Iberian Peninsula whose prosperous copper mines are threatened by the invasion of Suevi hordes (“Everything he had achieved looked as if it was slipping from his grasp; his very life was in danger, the storm that thundered around them a portent for disaster”). These two plotlines abruptly intertwine when Paulo suddenly encounters Claudio, mystically transported to the present day. This plot twist seems to come out of nowhere. The novel is comfortably settled into a captivating story of a man in the modern world building a business when suddenly it takes a hard right turn that isn’t grounded in the narrative other than that first introduction to Claudio in his own time. And this course change gets even stranger when both Claudio and Paulo begin seeking metaphysical wisdom from an older man who tends to say things like “After your universe was created from the massive explosive expansion of the singularity, the super-plasmic state of the singularity degraded as volume increased and pressures and temperature decreased.” This odd development ultimately derails the intriguing book.
A companionable but disjointed tale about a man’s encounter with a time traveler.