In August 1914, a military incident in a village in northern Mozambique marked the beginning of the First World War on the African continent. In Mia Couto’s novel River Blindness (»A Cegueira do Rio«), this unexpected episode also triggers a series of mysterious events that culminate in the disappearance of writing in the world. Books, reports, documents, photographs and maps are wiped clean, and no one seems to be able to master the art of writing. The inhabitants of this village are called upon to restore order to the world by teaching Europeans the craft of writing and the arts of navigation.

In Couto’s new novel The Cartographer of Absences (“O Mapeador de Ausências”), Diogo Santiago is a prestigious and respected Mozambican poet and intellectual, professor at the University of Maputo, who returns for the first time in many years to his homeland, the city of Beira, on the eve of the cyclone that devastated it in 2019, in order to receive a tribute that his fellow citizens wish to offer him. This journey will be above all a return to his past, to his childhood and youth, when Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony.

A white boy, he is the son of a journalist and, moreover, poet father, and a completely practical and down-to-earth mother. From his father he remembers what he experienced with him: two trips to the place of terrible massacres committed by the colonial troops, his persecution and imprisonment by the PIDE, but above all, and throughout all this, his love for poetry. Diogo also remembers others who inhabited and enriched his and Mozambique’s past. Today he is living a love story that perhaps would have never become one. It all depends on the point of view.

The Cartographer of Absences develops an intrigue with both logical rigor and unexpected surprise, which makes this novel one of the author’s finest works.

In Mia Couto’s literary universe, in which a thing – an animal, for example – can be a person, the clouds that we see circling the sky with our eyes can, if considered with our imagination, exist underground. And if that’s the case, a Compendium for Unearthing Clouds (“Compêndio para Desenterrar Nuvens”) is of the greatest use to us.
In these twenty-two exercises in imagination, Mia Couto once again guides us to discover what lies in those things which we see with our eyes and those which our imagination gives us to see. And beware: the two images don’t always match.

The Invisible Elephant Hunter (“O Caçador de Elefantes Invisíveis”) collects under this title, which is also the name of one of the tales, the beautiful stories that the magazine Visão has been publishing every month. The style is sober and precise, the themes are various and diverse, the place from where the author sees the world and portrays it in this book is so wide that everything fits in. Between the story of the poor old man who receives a male nurse at home who is on Covid 19 screening duty, and, towards the end of the book, the conversation of the statues that come down from their pedestals – of their own voliton and not knocked over – to talk about the evils and mistakes of this world, between one and another of these stories, the reader encounters characters and scenes that are not going to leave his memory any time soon.

The Invisible Elephant Hunter is once again Mia Couto at his best.

The Elegant Terrorist (And Other Stories) (“O Terrorista Elegante (E Outras Histórias)”) is made up of three stories based on theatre plays written jointly by José Eduardo Agualusa and Mia Couto, commissioned by the theatre groups A Barraca, from Lisbon, and Trigo Limpo – Teatro ACERT, from Tondela in Northern Portugal. In The Elegant Terrorist, which gives its title to the book, an Angolan isarrested in Portugal for his alleged participation in acts of terrorism. The man claims to be able to fly and talks to a bird in prison, which seems to give him the necessary guidance to fulfil his mission. – „I come here to kill.“ This is how the protagonist of It Rains Love in the Street of the Killer (“Chovem Amores na Rua do Matador”), the second story, finally tries to make peace with his past: by killing the threewomen in his life. The city night plunges into chaos and, as the conflict unfolds in the dark streets, a masked stranger looks for someone to kill. In Black Box (“A Caixa Preta”), generations of the same familyare forced to face their best-kept secrets. Three delicious short novellas, full of humour and suspense, by two of the most popular and renowned fiction authors in Portuguese.

The Sands of the Emperor (“As Areias do Imperador”) is a fascinating trilogy about the last of southern Mozambique’s emperors, Ngungunyane. Mia Couto achieves the miracle of personalizing history. His language does not overwhelm and does not accuse. It astonishes, makes beauty and terror palpable and shows the abysmal strangeness inherent in such an unequal encounter of cultures. To show this strangeness is perhaps the first step in dealing with the Other.

With The Drinker of Horizons (“O Bebedor de Horizontes”) Mia Couto completes his trilogy The Sands of the Emperor (“As Areias do Imperador”). The book can be read as a self-contained novel, but also picks up exactly where the second volume of the trilogy ended. It continues the love story between the fifteen-year-old African woman Imani and the Portuguese sergeant Germano de Melo. But the two will not meet again in this life: while Germano is left behind in Africa, Imani must accompany the imprisoned king of Gaza Ngungunyane and his seven women as an interpreter on the long voyage to Lisbon. For everyone but her, it will be a journey of no return. At the same time it is an odyssey through the Portuguese colonial empire at the turn of the year 1895/96. After showing the defeated “Barbarians” to the people and the international press in Lisbon, the king of Gaza is deported to the Azores. The women, among them Imani, who has to leave her new-born son Sanga with Germano’s mother, are brought to São Tomé. Imani finds a foothold above all with Dabondi, the youngest woman Ngungunyanes, who is a kind of seer and speaks in parables. Only after the fall of the monarchy in Portugal in 1911 does Imani return to her home village. On the return journey via Lisbon, she sees her son one last time.

Mia Couto achieves the miracle of personalizing history. His language does not overwhelm and does not accuse. It astonishes, makes beauty and terror palpable and shows the abysmal strangeness inherent in such an unequal encounter of cultures. To show this strangeness is perhaps the first step in dealing with the Other.

The Sword and the Spear (“A Espada e a Azagaia”), the second part of the trilogy, tells of the gradual demise of the kingdom of Gaza in Mozambique. After the attack on his quarters, the defeated sergeant Germano de Melo needs to be taken to hospital. The only one within reach is along the river Inhambane, so Imani goes on an arduous river journey with her father and brother. Meanwhile war rages around of them: the Portuguese occupiers and the king of Gaza’s warriors fight fierce battles with swords and spears, until the arrival of the machine gun ensures European supremacy. Germano wants to start a new life with the young Imani, but the Portuguese military have other plans for the injured soldier. Imani’s father also has different plans for his daughter: as one of Ngungunyane’s wives, she would be close enough to the tyrant to avenge the destruction of their village…

With poetic beauty, Mia Couto points to the futility of war and the boundaries of cultures that are apparently foreign to each other; boundaries which entire societies, but also families and lovers, conceive as simultaneously in decline, and yet still existent.

Woman of the Ashes (“Mulheres de Cinza”) is the first part of the trilogy. As punishment, the military sergeant Germano de Melo is posted to the African village of Nkokolani to oversee the Portugueseconquest of Ngungunyane’s empire. There he encounters Imani, a 15-year-old girl who helps him with her language skills, and a people torn between two sides: while Imani‘s brother Mwanatu is fighting for the Portuguese crown, Dubula has chosen Ngungunyane. Slowly and with all their differences, Imani and Germano are drawn to each other. But in a country haunted by men and war, the only hope for a woman isto remain unnoticed, as if made of shadows and ashes. In his characteristically beautiful prose and alternating between the voices of Imani and Germano, Mia Couto gives us a vivid and unsettling account of a Mozambique at war at the end of the 19th century.

Confession of the Lioness (“A Confissão da Leoa”) tells the captivating story of the hunter Arcanjo, who is sent to an African village haunted by man-eating lions. There he slowly discovers the darkest secrets of its inhabitants, victims of brutality and inhuman traditions. Based on true facts and written in atmospheric language, Confession of the Lioness skilfully interweaves the enthralling stories of Arcanjo and his former lover Mariamar, constantly surprising the reader with unexpected twists and turns.

Have a look at an English extract on bookanista here!

The Tuner of Silences (“Jesusalém”) tells the fascinating story of a family whose lives were shaped by a deeply hidden tragedy. Mwanito and his father Silvestre live far removed from civilization when suddenly a woman appears to disturb their peaceful world, bringing them back to the city. There, Mwanito finally finds out how his mother died and what drove his father to insanity and into the wilderness. A powerful story about oblivion and how we deal with pain and guilt. The novel has been longlisted for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2015.

In God’s Poison, Devil’s Relief (“Venenos de Deus, Remédios do Diabo”) three inhabitants of Vila Cacimba, a small village in Mozambique, are the protagonists: Bartolomeu Sozinho, a retired mechanic, his mulatto wife Munda, and Alfredo Suaecelência, the local authority a vain, corrupt administrator who has been friends with Bartolomeu since childhood and is in constant competition with him. Sidónio Rosa, a Portuguese doctor and aid worker with the task of dealing with an epidemic of meningitis in Vila Cacimba, is a witness to this conflict, which is loaded with sexual tension. Gradually, Sidónio comes to recognise the secrets and contradictions of the African village.

In reality, Sidónio Rosa came to the village in search of Deolinda, who he had met and fallen in love with in Portugal. She is Bartolomeu and Munda’s daughter, allegedly away on a trip. Again and again, Sidónio walks the path from the village’s only boarding house, to the couple’s home to visit Bartolomeu, who is suffering from severe diabetes. He becomes a kind of mediator between the old couple, who argue and fight although they still love each other. The couple tell him they are only in contact with their daughter by letter, but it later transpires that she died during the abortion of Suaecelência’s child. The administrator maintains she died of AIDS. The competition between Bartolomeu and the village head is to do with politics and also with love, as Bartolomeu has reason to suspect that his wife is also Suaecelência’s lover.

All the protagonists are caught up in a web of contradictions  even Sidónio, who claims to be a doctor but has not yet finished his medical degree and ought not to be treating patients. In African narrative tradition, the truth is just as important as its many variations. This book is a beautiful illustration of how people weave illusions around themselves so that they do not have to die.

The Sirene’s Other Foot (“O Outro Pé da Sereia”) is set in Mozambique in the year 2002. Mwadia Malunga and her husband, the shepherd Zero Madzero, discover a statue of the Virgin Mary. Mwadia is keen to bring the statue to Vila Longe, her place of birth, to keep it in a secure place. She is delighted to return to the village where she was born. The reader becomes acquainted with Mwadias mother, her stepfather, Lázaro the Curandeiro, the inhabitants of Vila Longe and finally, an Afro-American from the United States, allegedly on a quest for his lost African roots along with his Brazilian wife.

On pages of ever-shifting tone and colour, narratives of the present alternate with stories from the past. The statue of the Virgin Mary that Mwadia would find over four hundred years later, was transported on a ship from Goa to Mozambique in 1560, by the Jesuit missionary Dom Gonçalo da Silveira. It was his gift for the ruler of the mythical realm of Monomotapa and was to convert the people to Christianity. On the ship, which also carries slaves, he is accompanied by the young priest Manuel Antunes, who in the course of the crossing speaks out against the inhumane handling of the slaves. A lively picture emerges from colonial times up to the present day. And it would not be a book by Mia Couto if the author were not to capture the magical, mythical world of Mozambique with the all musicality of his language, linking the daily lives of his country’s people in past and present.

As in The Last Flight of the Flamingo (“O Último Voo do Flamingo”) or A River Called Time, a House Called Earth (“Um Rio Chamado Tempo, uma Casa Chamada Terra”) the author continues using his very own, uniquely melodic language to describe a world deeply marked by traditional forms yet caught up in the process of constant change in present-day Mozambique.

The Sleepwalking Land (“Terra Sonâmbula”), his first novel, was praised by the critics as one of the best novels in the Portuguese language to have appeared in recent years. In 2002 the Jury Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century” selected The Sleepwalking Land among the top twelve. Its scenario is the battle for survival in the civil war in Mozambique. Similar to the magical realism of Latin America, in this novel and in Under the Frangipani Tree (“A Varanda do Frangipani”) Couto conjures up the nightmare of an omnipresent threat in a way which combines historical truth with individual dreams and living collective myths.

After his first volume of poems Couto published several short story collections and novels. He describes everyday life in Mozambique, a country whose people are among the world’s poorest and most maltreated after three decades of civil war. In the process of doing so, Couto integrates elements of his country’s oral tradition and his prose, which is of great musicality, succeeds in creating surreal-ghostly atmospheres out of a concrete link with reality.

The Water and the Eagle (“A Água e a Águia”) is about a period of drought and how it is finally stopped by an old eagle. This old eagle starts eating the “i” in the name of her species, so “águia” (eagle) is transformed into “água” (water), and this way the water comes back. But only for a time: after the eagles have discovered how great it is to eat “i”s, they cannot stop, and the “rio” (river) stays without the “i” and dries out. Finally the oldest eagle decides to take a risk and despite everybody’s warnings, flies to a cliff and vomits all the “i”s she has yet eaten – and the water and the river come back!
This is a poetic and beautifully illustrated book about how ingenuity and courage can change the world.

Suddenly, in an African village, the rain does not fall, it is suspended, “amazed”, says a little boy from the village. The river is also drying up. Is it the fault of a factory nearby? Is it magic? What role do the old myths and legends play here? Can the cloud senders solve the problem? In The Amazed Rain (“A Chuva Pasmada”) Mia Couto leads us to a magical universe, to which the beautiful illustrations of Danuta Wojciechowska add a special touch.

Books are not meant to be written for children. We will barely be old enough to live in stories. Delighted, like the characters in this little book. In this way, in Little Word Kisses (“O Beijo da Palavrinha”), we will be able to be kissed by words. When Maria Poeirinha fell ill, Uncle Jaime Litorânio said that only the sea, which she had never seen, could cure her. The girl was too weak for the journey, but her brother Zeca Zonzo found a way to take her to see the sea. The magic power of words is the theme of this second book for children by Mia Couto, once again with magnificent illustrations by Danuta Wojciechowska.

Pintalgato, a kitten, is always being warned by his mother not to step beyond the borders of the day. But he, crazy to discover what hides under the shadow of the night, decides to venture out and ends up having an unusual encounter with the dark. When he returns to the light of day, he discovers that his coat, previously yellow with little spots, is now black as night, and he is terrified. With his mother’s help, however, he realizes that the fear of the dark, in fact, is the fear of the “dark ideas we have about the dark”.
In engaging prose and full of little poetic surprises, in The Kitten and the Dark (“O Gato e o Escuro”) Mia Couto elaborates a beautiful fable about the afflictions and enchantments of the unknown. In the words of the author: “Most of the fears we have suffered, as children and adults, have been fabricated to rob us of curiosity and to kill the desire to know what exists beyond the horizon.”