mia couto Archives - A Geography of Reading

After reading more of Bolaño’s 2666 than I ever should have, I cleaned my bookshelves of all the to-read have-tos that I’ve held on to for far too long. And found myself without anything to read. Failure to read good books generally puts me in a state of existential crisis, so I decided to return to an old favorite—Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes. Even after leafing through a few chapters in random order, I could feel myself restored. And I wanted more, so I turned to my shelf of books to review and found Mia Couto, a writer from Mozambique who also writes in Portuguese. I’ve spent a few wonderful days now with Rain and Other Stories and want to share with you the experience of reading this man’s work with Lobo Antunes in the background.

Writing and War

I’ve read many books by Lobo Antunes, a physician who fought in the Angolan war. His language is as lyrical as his thought and the books I’ve enjoyed most shift almost imperceptibly back and forth between African memories and European presents. On this read, I found myself immersed in sentences like “Lisbon, even at this hour, is a city as devoid of mystery as a nudist beach” and “I’m traveling the gentle geography of your body, the river of your voice, the cool shade of your hands, the pigeon-breast down of your pubis, but me and Xana and you, the Saturday rain, we are the only ones who truly exist…” Swoon. With a translation it’s always hard to tell whether to credit the author or translator (here, Margaret Jull Costa) but I suspect both contributed heavily to the magic of the flow of this book.

In Lobo Antunes, Africa is half of one whole. It’s either the immediate present of a man immersed in a memory of war or the tortured background against which the luscious European present unfolds. For Couto, though, Africa is everything—the tortured past and the luscious present, the luscious past and the tortured present. Rain and Other Stories was written after Mozambique’s war, and Couto writes in the introduction, “After the war, I thought all that was left was ashes, hollow ruins… Today I know that’s not true. Where man remains, a seed, too, survives, a dream to inseminate time.” Forgiving the decidedly visual metaphor, this is very much a book for our time, a time when we need to see the future beyond the [INSERT HYBERBOLIC ADJECTIVE HERE] headlines. Couto finds magic in those after-war ashes (literally and figuratively) and so shall we.

The Richness of Africa

Most of the books I’ve loved about Africa have been the books of the colonizers… partly because those were the books I was exposed to and partly because they reinforced the ideas of Africa that I grew up with during the “Feed the World” generation. Couto, too, is white. Born in Mozambique to Portuguese immigrants, he could be writing colonial books as well. And maybe the magic and use of folk images that I’m responding too is appropriated, but Rain and Other Stories feels written with the honest respect of someone who loves a country and a culture. Because Couto is Africa born and he lived through the war there, his experience, too is authentic and I wish I could have read this book without thinking so hard about race—because it’s good. I should (and will) read other narratives of different life experiences in Mozambique, but for now let me tell you about this gifted storyteller.

In “The Waters of Time,” the first story in this collection, a child rows down the river with his grandfather. It’s a simple set-up that quickly opens into another world as the narrator describes the lake they would row to:

“This was the realm of forbidden creatures. All that showed itself there, after all, invented its existence… Everything around us bathed in cool breezes, shadows made of light itself, as if the morning were eternally drowned in dreams.” – Mia Couto, Waters of Time

This fantastical world where they go to watch white cloths dance in the distance contrasts sharply with the quotidian rituals home. Through his use of tense, Couto manages to make both realms feel habitual and yet his images are rich enough to make both alive. I won’t tell you how the story unfurls because the pleasure of experiencing it for the first time was simply too great. But I want to… Suffice it to say that the river and water are recurring themes in this book in a way that feels very of the place and also ancient and of all of us.

“Water and time are twin brothers, born of the same womb. I had just discovered in myself a river that would never die. It’s to that river I now return, guiding my son…” – Mia Couto, Waters of Time

Aphorisms Abound

Like Portuguese writer Paulo Coelho, Couto makes liberal use of aphorisms, but unlike Coelho’s aphorisms (which can seem canned and cheap), Couto’s sound deeply across time and experience:

Fear is a river one must cross wet.
The illusion of being right is born when everyone is wrong at the very same time.
Work is like a river: even when it’s reaching an end, what comes behind is more and more river.
Snakes are bilingual to show that every animal contains a second creature.
Love is the world divided by zero.
He who tastes unripe fruit soon wants to try its flower.
Beauties subtract from one another: we see the butterfly and forget the flower.

These aphorisms were rich enough that I wondered if Couto was borrowing from Mozambican folklore, but while that may be true (I know woefully little about Mozambique), the way he (and translator Eric M.B. Becker) work around language to bring it to life, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the aphorisms were original. A few favorite examples are:

swallowed up into never
a walking beer-sponge
nestled in the night’s womb
the dictionary of her footsteps

Honestly I’ve struggled while writing this review, because every time I open the book to find more examples of things I want to share with you, I get so sucked back into the writing that I simply want to read it all over again. That is to say that I’m so enjoying being lost in Couto’s craft that I don’t really want to deconstruct it. Stories I keep returning to are: “Blind Estrelinho”, “The Delivery”, “The Flag in the Sunset”, “Beyond the River Bend” and “High-Heel Shoes”. Each story captures in its own way a very different life, a different experience and yet Couto manages in every single one to seduce me with language and then upend my expectations. The surprise is so much a part of the enjoyment that I don’t want to spoil these stories for you. I want you to read them for yourself. Immediately. (That means you, Dad… I’ll send you a copy.)

Luscious Characters

There’s one more story in Rain and Other Stories I can’t not tell you about. This part does contain spoilers. “The Perfume” is the story of Gloria, a woman “accustomed to living low” whose husband comes home with a present and announces they’re going dancing. In the first paragraph, Couto fully unravels the accumulated staleness of their marriage which contrasts beautifully with Justino’s gift to make us as surprised as Gloria. We’re with her as she warily dresses in the given dress and eventually throws a bottle of perfume Justino gave her when they were courting but that she’s never had occasion to wear out the window where it breaks on the sidewalk.

The strangeness between the pair continues as they leave the house and travel to the dance where habitually jealous Justino encourages her to dance with other men and then leaves her. It’s a confusing and somewhat devastating story as we’re locked inside what Gloria must be feeling at this humiliation, this parting. Except Gloria is a richer character than that. She arrives home, alone, to find her husband certainly gone, and in the morning she wakes in her bed to the smell of that perfume wafting though the window. She steps outside and cuts herself on the bottle and this is how the story concludes:

“To this day, one can find the indelible tracks on the living-room floor from when Gloria shed the first drops of her bloody glee.” – Mia Couto, The Perfume

I have noticed that both of these authors are male and I’m trying to read more broadly than I have in the past. Thankfully someone (@DeepVellum) approached me on Twitter and recommended Maria Gabriela Llansol and Noemi Jaffe. I’ve read neither yet, but they’re on my Goodreads list. And I’ll continue to seek out Mozambican and Angolan authors with different sets of life experiences. If you have recommendations, please leave them in the comments.

To immerse yourself in some of the magic of these books, pick up a copy of Rain and Other Stories or Land at the End of the Worldfrom Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

I wrote recently about a book so rich with description I didn’t know where to focus. How perfect it was, then, to open The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto–a book so cleanly written, so tightly edited that every word matters. With this extraordinary concision, Couto leaves room for the reader and I became deeply invested in the story of Mwanito and Ntunzi and their father.

What’s most surprising to me about this book is how it can be so spare and yet so rich. If I said Couto’s language was like poetry, you might misunderstand me and think it is difficult to understand. Instead the language in this book is like looking into a crystal clear lake and being able to see every detail of the fish, vegetation, and geology while at the same time seeing your reflection and that of the sky and the trees behind you. Like the best poetry, Couto has placed on the page the framework of an extraordinary story but it’s in your mind that the full magic of the world comes to life.

Some of my impressions of the book are fragmentary because I’m still mulling it over. Although my writing won’t create the same magic Couto’s does, perhaps these fragments will inspire something in you.

A Life Contained

“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” – Mia Couto

From that enticing and strange first sentence, I was hooked on this book. It doesn’t take long to understand that the speaker of that line, Mwanito, has been hustled by his father out to an abandoned game preserve where they have lived with Mwanito’s brother Ntunzi, a soldier named Zachary, and a donkey for eight years–ever since “the world had come to an end and we were the only survivors.” The only contact this odd group has with the outside world is Mwanito’s uncle, Aproximado.

This is not a dystopian novel. Instead it is the story of a man who could not deal with the real world and so he ran away with his children. It is the story of a son who from the age of three was assigned the vocation “to take care of this incurable absence” left by the death of his mother. And it is the story of the other people around them who are trying to cope with the world Mwanito’s father created.

Here Boys Come to Be Made Men

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself reading a lot of coming of age novels about boys. From A Separate Peace to Out Stealing Horses to The Tuner of Silences and The Storyteller, there’s a definite trend. Perhaps the big milestones and emotional growth spurts happening around me, not the least of which is my baby brother’s wedding this coming weekend, are calling me to better understand the men in my life.

“Some people have children in order to get closer to God. He had become God when he became my father.” – Mia Couto

Of all these books, the boys in The Tuner of Silences become men in the least desirable circumstances. Although their father is present physically, Mwanito and Ntunzi have the doubly difficult job of finding their own realities inside (or outside) their father’s delusion. It’s a sad circumstance, but an all-too-common one. Part of the magic of how Couto engaged me with this book was setting me up to think about what these boys would miss along the way to manhood and who they would become. I thought a lot about my childhood and those of the people around me. I thought about the kind of parent I would want to be.

Reality Intrudes

It’s obvious from the first sentence of this book that the outside world will intrude. But I kind of wish it hadn’t. As much as I wanted the boys to escape their father and find control over their own lives, I didn’t love the way it went down. I won’t go into details, but it does involve a woman and the story changes significantly from there.

The Aphorist

“Every silence contains music in a state of gestation.” – Mia Couto

Every sentence in this book sings and I found myself wanting to underline section after section. I also started to wonder about aphorisms in this age where so many of us are seeking wisdom and guidance. The first aphorist who comes to mind, one I see quoted frequently, is Paolo Coelho. But although Coelho’s lines often seem deep at first glance, sentiments like “Stop being who you were and become who you are” quickly start to feel pat and hollow.

Meanwhile, there’s a world of thought contained in Couto’s subtext. One of the pleasures of this book was returning to some of his lines to mull over their full implications. I guess when I look for guidance it will be from someone who teaches me how to think rather than telling me the answers he or she has found.

I loved this book and I will read it again. I have a feeling because so much of the experience of this book is the merging of the text and what I bring to the text that it will never be the same book twice. I will be very interested to see what Couto inspires me to think about next time around.

If you want to make up your own mind about this book, pick up a copy of The Tuner of Silences from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.