A worthy if overlong introduction to a unique and atmospheric African writer’s work.
A career-spanning collection from the Mozambican writer, seeking an intersection between his country’s folklore and its colonial past.
Many of the stories here appear in English (from the Portuguese) for the first time, drawing from works first published in 1986 to a clutch of new material. Despite that breadth, Couto’s concerns, and much of his style, have remained consistent: He focuses on the inner lives of everyday people, usually with a twist involving mysticism or superstition. “The Tale of the Two Who Returned From the Dead” is about just that, about two apparitions caught up in the local bureaucracy. In “The Flagpoles of Beyondwards,” an allegory about the impossibility of isolation from outside forces, a man tries to protect his daughter from a visitor’s attention. Shape-shifting abounds: A heart gives birth to a child in “The Child’s Heart and the Heart’s Child” while a man’s wife takes the form of multiple women in “Ezequiela, Humanity,” much to the husband’s pleasure and, eventually, fear. Stories drawn from the collection Rain: And Other Stories(2019) deal more explicitly with Mozambican history, specifically its civil war that ran from the 1970s through the '90s, but he’s more interested in conjuring a melancholy mood. That’s not always to his credit; stories often don’t end so much as drift to lyrical conclusions; his recent Sands of the Emperor Trilogy (Woman of the Ashes, 2018, etc.) is on sturdier historical footing. But his most potent stories here merge the humane and surrealistic, often with nautical premises. A whale is believed capable of providing whatever a man might wish; a mute girl who finds her voice at the seashore and the neighbors in the closing title story speak in bittersweet tones about their (and our) connection to the sea: “A tear is the sea caressing your soul. That little speck of water is us as we return to the womb we came from.”
A worthy if overlong introduction to a unique and atmospheric African writer’s work.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7796-388-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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