Eliete: A Normal Life

Eliete reflects on an apparently ordinary life against the background of a three-generation story of the 20th and 21st century in Portugal.

Eliete is forty (-something)
Eliete has been married to Jorge for twenty years
Eliete has an average career as an average estate agent
Eliete has a completely normal life
Eliete has reached breaking-point

Eliete is stuck in both a dead-end job, and a dead-end marriage. She's never had many grand dreams or ambitions, but now she is starting to wonder if life might have passed her by, and if it's too late to do anything about it.

So, Eliete decides to join Tinder. She sets up some fake dating profiles, and embarks on a number of liaisons with various men around suburban Lisbon. Will this ignite her marriage with the spark it so desperately needs? Unlikely. It is the summer of 2016: Jorge has become hooked on Pokemon Go!, there's football on the telly, he's got opinions on Brexit, and he remains completely oblivious to his wife's new exploits.

And then, in the middle of all of this, Eliete's grandmother is diagnosed with dementia, and moves in with them. Alarmingly, her illness seems to have resurfaced some scandalous personal memories, and her unguarded outbursts threaten to reveal explosive, long-buried family secrets. Secrets that suddenly turn Eliete's perception of herself upside-down, as her seemingly normal life collapses around her . . .

Translated from the Portuguese by Angel Gurria-Quintana