Ash Thursday
Entry 21
Jacket design
Well, this is a nice treat. A sample jacket design for the book has just dropped into my inbox, and I think it’s stunning. I’m so pleased with it!
(As you can imagine, it can be a bit grim working lovingly for weeks/months/years on a book only to learn that it’s going to be presented to the world under a design you hate …)
Of course, the final decision is for the publishers to take – in consultation with JEA too, and he won’t have seen it yet – but I very much hope we can go with this or something very like it.
After we met up in Bath the other day I sent James, the designer, the full manuscript of the book, and having now read it he has created this image. I’m so glad he was able to read the whole thing before we had to finalise the design; this isn’t an image he could have come up with if he hadn’t read the whole lot – it’s not a moment of the book that’s narratively important enough to make it into any synopsis or brief we could have given him, but nonetheless it’s an incredibly powerful image, and one of the things I think will stick in readers’ minds.
The fragment that prompted the image is Chapter 7 of ‘Exile’ (book 4), a one-paragraph chapter, which currently reads as follows:
Blind airplanes bombarded the forests of the North for almost six weeks. In his desperate flight to Zaire, Tiago de Santiago da Ressureição André saw the villages devastated by the fury of the Portuguese, the rivers and forests devoured by napalm fire. Close to Nova Caipemba, he told me, they found a wood made entirely of unvarying ash, and within it a few huts also of ash, and inside the huts, mats and water jars; and a variety of utensils, all of ash. Fixed to the smallest branches of the trees were hundreds of little birds, also of dead ash, with their happy songs of rain crystallised at the tips of their beaks. The bombs of the Portuguese had frozen the passage of time over the wood, enclosing that anxious instant in a bell-jar of ashes. When a moment – a moment that everyone felt was never ending – had passed, someone raised his arm and with the tips of his fingers touched the fragile ash structure. Then the whole wood began to collapse, with a slow whisper of light rain, and with it the birds and the huts and the domestic utensils, and soon there was nothing around them but a broad plain of unchanging ash.
And here, in the pdf below, is James’s suggested jacket. I hope you like it as much as I do. The colours, the tone, the fragile outlines, all seem to me to suit the book perfectly – and quite apart from that I think it’s just very striking to look at. Do hope the others agree with me …
Download the proposed jacket design (Adobe Acrobat .doc 563Kb)
If you would like to comment on this blog, email translationblog@booktrust.org.uk
Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn
