In The New York Review of Book‘s November issue, Ivo de Figueiredo’s Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask (Yale University Press, 2019) is recognized as an “illuminating” biography that not only traces Ibsen’s life and singular success as a playwright, but also his reach among his contemporaries and shaping of the time:

“Above all, de Figueiredo displays a clear sense of why any biography of Ibsen must also, on some level, be a biography of European culture and society—so representative was the playwright of the age in which he lived.
‘Ibsen’s career was coterminous with the second half of the nineteenth century,’ de Figueiredo writes; ‘he appears to be almost a personification of the divisions of the literary history of the period.’ … One of the most illuminating aspects of the biography is its portrayal of Ibsen’s political evolution. … His evocation of the cultural and political tensions Ibsen lived through and alluded to in his writings is especially illuminating.”
– Morten Høi Jensen, New York Review of Books

Figueiredo’s memoir, A Stranger at My Table, was published by DoppelHouse Press in spring 2019. He uses that same prowess for describing socio-political events in this autobiography, eloquently familiarizing his readers with the many global factors that affected his family and the Goan diaspora as a whole, such as British imperialism and the effects of its collapse on Goans in East Africa.

Photo: Jo Michael