His series of thrillers around the historian and cryptologist Tomás Noronha, sold millions of copies worldwide, earned him the nickname the Portuguese Dan Brown. With his most recent title, The woman with the red dragon, it exposes the atrocities of Chinese re-education camps based on real events. We met José Rodrigues dos Santos during his visit to the Montreal Book Fair.
In addition to writing thrillers for almost 20 years, you have been a war reporter and have presented the evening news on Portugal’s leading public channel for 32 years. How did you get there?
I’m still a war reporter. Besides, I was supposed to be in Israel this week, but I postponed [mon voyage]. I started my career at 17, in Macau. In 1991 I was working for the BBC in London and the Gulf War broke out. I was on live all night, and after that I moved to the evening news. I am not the oldest, but the oldest presenter of the evening news in Europe. [L’écriture] was never in my horizons. I was doing my first doctoral thesis on war reporting, and the president of the Portuguese Writers Association read the book. He said to me, “I think you’re a novelist.” » He ran a magazine and he asked me to write a short story. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t say no. So I started writing a short story about East Timor, based on my thesis research. Finally, I dove in, and suddenly I had 200 pages. Afterwards, I was addicted to writing fiction.
For writing The woman with the red dragon, you consulted – as you always do for your novels – a vast bibliography (you have also been described as the “king of the well-informed thriller”). What was the starting point of this story?
I had already worked on China with Immortal. But this time, I went much further to report on the situation of minorities, the return of concentration camps, with millions of people locked up, and plans for expansion. This is not a novel about China, but about the Chinese Communist Party – and it is always important to emphasize this, because the Chinese are the first victims of this regime. Since China is such an important trading partner, we need to understand what is happening there.
Did you intend from the start to write to warn?
We do not know much about the laogai from China [camps de rééducation par le travail] because she hides everything and she forgets everything. But as Solzhenitsyn said, when we forget the past, we are condemned to repeat it. And this is indeed what is happening in China. Mao had already done it – in a different way, of course, but it is basically the same situation. We must put an end to this “People’s Republic of Amnesia”, as it is called. […] The Chinese Communist Party is the greatest genocidaire in history; it took between 30 million and 65 million people. There is no person, no organization that has killed as many people as the Party, which remains there and with which we have normal relations. Would we have any connections with the Nazis? It’s important to understand the issues.
Why is fiction the best vehicle for transmission?
For me, all great works of literature touch on the truth. In Madame BovaryFlaubert stated a hidden truth in the 19the century, and that is why it has become a universal work. In 1984, by George Orwell, was the first time anyone showed what the Soviet communist regime was. And it was a shock – he was even isolated, criticized. […] Fiction is also very powerful. It’s one thing to write: there are more than a hundred concentration camps in China with millions of people locked up for ethnic and racial reasons. It’s another thing to see what’s going on with a person. Stalin said: “The death of a person is a tragedy; the death of a million people is a statistic. » And the novel brings us back to the person, to the tragedy. When we tell, in The woman with the red dragonthe story of Madina, we begin to identify with it and we understand things in a much more powerful way.
Why was it important for you to identify in a very detailed endnote all the real events that inspired the novel and your reference sources?
I am an academic; I taught for 25 years at the University of Lisbon, I have two doctorates, so this academic side is always present. I find it important to explain to readers what is not fiction. It helps to understand better and it’s a way to close the novel.
What issues does your brand new title address? Spinoza – The man who killed God ?
Spinoza was the one who created, with his concessions, liberal democracies. It is said that the father of liberalism is John Locke. But what happened was that John Locke went from England to Amsterdam after Spinoza died; he read all his work, then he went back and wrote down his ideas. But he couldn’t quote him because he was a cursed author, because he said: God is nature, and the Bible is a human creation. Much of what is happening today can be found in Spinoza’s life: questions of religion, questions of identity that he spoke of in the 17th century.e century. So there is a link because The woman with the red dragon shows us what is happening today, and Spinoza – The man who killed God shows us how our liberal societies were created and are now under attack.
José Rodrigues dos Santos will give a major interview (in French) this Friday at the Salon (from 1:15 p.m. to 2 p.m.) and will be at a signing session on Saturday and Sunday (at 1 p.m.). He will also be at a signing session at the Renaud-Bray branch in Côte-des-Neiges (Saturday at 4 p.m.). Note that his most recent title, Spinoza – The man who killed Godjust arrived in bookstores this week.
The woman with the red dragon
Editions Hervé Chopin
624 pages
Spinoza – The man who killed God
Editions Hervé Chopin
570 pages