Mia Couto – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 THE TUNER OF SILENCES by Mia Couto /2014/the-tuner-of-silences-by-mia-couto/ Mon, 03 Feb 2014 12:45:16 +0000 /?p=24991 Book Quote:

“I was eleven years old when I saw a woman for the first time, and I was seized by such sudden surprise that I burst into tears.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (FEB 3, 2014)

The above opening line pulled me immediately into Mia Couto’s novel, The Tuner of Silences; it raised questions for me from the beginning and these didn’t let me go until the end. Mwanito, the narrator, reflecting back on the early years of his life, recounts his experiences while living in the company of three men and his slightly older brother in a remote campsite in a semi-desert. Couto, an award-winning Mozambican author, has written a novel that is part coming of age story, part family drama and part a kind of love story.

Mwanito’s mature voice recaptures covincingly the innocence of his childhood, his gradual awakening to a life that may be different from the one prescribed by his father, whose trauma and loss keep haunting him. In the tradition of African story telling, Couto’s narration moves with ease from realistic depiction of people and scenarios to fantasy, symbolism, mythology and the rich imagination of dreams. Set against the early years of post-Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique, Couto touches on questions of race and identity, of long held beliefs and traditions, and the uncertainties in the newly independent country.

After the sudden death of his wife, Mwanito’s distraught father takes his sons and flees the city for an abandoned game reserve far away. For him life as he knew it has ended and, he explains to his sons, “Over There,” beyond their camp, the world has seized to exist; it is a total wasteland. He declares the camp an “independent” land, names it “Jezoosalem”. Yes, the religious connotation is intended. Following the “renaming ceremony” of place and people, he, now Silvestre, rules “his land” dictatorially, his strict discipline not to be questions. The children live in fear of their father. No books are allowed or anything to do with writing; Mwanito is forbidden to learn: he is to be the Tuner of Silences. “I was born to keep quiet. My only vocation is silence…” he recalls his early experiences. Only he can calm the father’s anxieties. The family is accompanied by a raggedly looking ex-soldier who acts as a servant, security guard, hunter for essential meat supplies and, sometimes, friend to Ntunzi, Mwanito’s brother. Lastly, there is “Uncle Aproximado”, who lives at the edge of the game reserve, far away from the camp. He turns up from time to time to bring other essential supplies from “Over There.” His arrival is welcomed by the boys, who also wonder whether he steals, whether the father has escaped a crime, whether there is really a “wasteland” beyond the perimeter they are allowed to explore…

Mwanito, too young to remember his mother or anything from “Over There,” is a docile and dedicated follower of his father’s instructions. However, influenced by his older brother’s stories about their mother, Mwanito feels her presence in his vivid dreams, yet cannot define her features. Ntunzi, old enough to have been to school, pressures his younger brother to go against the father’s rule and learn to read, one letter at a time. “I already knew how to travel across written letters, as if each one were an endless highway. But I still needed to learn how to dream and to remember. I wanted that boat that took Ntunzi into the arms of our dead mother…”

Eventually, after years in isolation, Marta, the woman from the novel’s opening sentence appears, inadvertantly disturbing the life of each of the camp’s inhabitants and challenging the father’s enforced order. Marta’s presence is not quite as coincidental as it may seem at first, although some readers might find her involvement with the family and their secrets a bit too convenient. Still, she represents an important new conduit to the world outside, essential for the boys in coming to terms with their understanding of identity and other needs.

Mia Couto’s writing is engaging, his sense of place evident and with it the description of the abandoned game reserve in the semi-desert environment evocative. I found the story’s narrator Mwanito totally believable and in his childhood observations, his dreams, desires and wonderments very endearing. While his father may need him as the Tuner of Silences, the boy is a very astute observer of his surroundings. In his musings his language is gentle, poetic and rich in imagery. Silvestre, the father, by contrast, comes across as a tragic figure. In his inability to communicate, he isolates himself increasingly from his children. Unable to recover from his personal trauma, his clinging to a happier past with pseudo-religious rituals alienates his children and, rather than protecting them from the “wasteland Over There,” pushes them towards planning their escape if there is a chance. Given the place and the time frame the novel is set, I sense that Couto while personalizing his story very effectively, his novel also explores the deeper societal traumas and challenges that people in Mozambique have faced in their recent history. For me, this has been a thought provoking read.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 2 readers
PUBLISHER: Biblioasis (February 26, 2013)
REVIEWER: Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Mia Couto
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

]]> A RIVER CALLED TIME by Mia Couto /2009/river-called-time-by-mia-couto/ Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:56:12 +0000 /?p=4794 Book Quote:

“At long last I’m free of that slumber that tied me to the sheet on the big table. You can’t imagine how much I wearied of that room, how tired I was of the visitors who kept arriving, feigning sadness. Where were they when I was alive and kicking, and in need of support? Why were they now assembled together in a show of tears and prayers? Didn’t you think it too much fuss for such limited ends? Well, let me give you the answer: it was fear. That’s why they came. It wasn’t death that they were scared of, but the dead man I am now. They feared the powers I gained by crossing that last frontier.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (SEP 26, 2009)

Author Mia Couto was born in Mozambique to white Portuguese settlers during a period when Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. In a country destined to change radically in his lifetime, Couto has lived through a military coup in 1974 and survived the Mozambican Civil War which left close to a million dead. In 2003 following the invasion of Iraq, Couto–understanding the first hand results of the devastating effects of civil war on innocents–wrote an open letter to President Bush criticizing American foreign policy. With that information in mind, it should come as no surprise that Couto is a writer whose novels carry global, social significance. Couto is a writer who cares about the world humans tend to trash, and he’s a writer who believes in taking a stand.

Couto’s novel Under the Frangipani (translated and published in English in 2001), while ostensibly a detective novel set in a nursing home, blends Mozambique’s colonial history of slave trading with the death of a former military man guilty of many crimes hidden by the social upheaval of the civil war.

Similarly in A River Called Time–a 2002 novel translated from Portuguese by David Brookshaw and published in North America by Serpent’s Tail in September 2009, Couto’s characters cannot be separated from the country’s turbulent past. The novel begins when main character Mariano is summoned back from his studies in the city to the island village of Luar-do-Chao to attend the funeral of his grandfather, family patriarch, Dito Mariano. There’s an immediate sense of mystery mingled with bad omens in what should be a simple–albeit significant–family event.

A River Called Time is an inventive and often playful blend of family politics, African mythology, and magical realism as Couto explores one family’s history against the larger backdrop of a troubled country split by the taint of past colonialism and divisive civil war. Even the name of the family home reflects the country’s divisions:

“The house is named “Nyumba-Kaya” in order “to satisfy relatives from both the North and the South. ‘Nyumba’ is the word for ‘house’ in the Northern languages. In Southern tongues, the word for house is ‘kaya.’”

Mariano’s large, extended family descend on the grandfather’s simple home. According to tradition, the roof has been removed from the living room as “mourning ordains that the sky must penetrate all the rooms, to cleanse them of cosmic impurities.” With the corpse still in the house, Mariano’s grandfather’s presence is as strong as ever, and then Mariano begins to receive messages from beyond the grave. Dito Mariano, it seems, has not yet completely departed. He has “died badly” and lingers in the space between the living and the dead. In order for Dito Mariano to complete his journey to the world of the dead, something must occur….

Dito Mariano’s three sons are each locked into a different phase of Mozambique history: Mariano’s father was “a guerrilla, a revolutionary, opposed to colonial injustice,” Uncle Abstinencio is frozen into tradition and one day “went into exile in his own home,” while the youngest, Uncle Ultimo, wants to eradicate the house and build a luxury resort hotel–thus effectively erasing the last vestiges of the past. With older generations split along lines of different political beliefs and against the open, fetid sores of a recent civil war, Mariano appears to be the person who can possibly fuse old disagreements, and then he discovers that his grandfather wished him to assume the responsibilities of running family affairs. But family affairs are impossibly entwined with the past, and even the island itself still bears the scars of the recently concluded civil war:

“There were coconut palms, the crows, the slowburning fires coming into view. The cement houses were in ruins, exhausted by years of neglect. It wasn’t just the houses that were falling to pieces: time itself was crumbling away. I could still see the letters on a wall through the grime of time: ‘Our land will be the graveyard of capitalism.’ During the war, I had had visions that I never wanted repeated. As if such memories came from a part of me that had already died.”

Couto explores the African concept of death; there’s no clear dividing line, no before and after, no mutually exclusive concepts of life and death, but just one long continual journey in which death only causes a change in the physical condition. Using the strong oral traditions of African culture, the novel fluidly alternates narratives between the younger Mariano and his grandfather. The two communicate as they never did in life, and Mariano gradually discovers just who his grandfather was.

I tend to be drawn to Serpent’s Tail books for their superior crime titles–they publish some of the best new crime books on the market, so A River Called Time is a different side of Serpent’s Tail for this reader. Couto–considered one of his country’s foremost writers is largely unknown by North American readers due to the unavailability of his books in English. It’s always impressive to see a publisher champion an author, and bravo to Serpent’s Tail for facilitating access to Mia Couto.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Serpent’s Tail (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Mia Couto
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Our review of:

Other books set in Africa:

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

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