Rain

Starred review from December 1, 2018

This stellar story collection from prolific Mozambican author Couto, a 2015 Man Booker International Prize finalist, initially appeared shortly after the 1992 end of his country's civil war. It does not, however, dwell on overt violence, instead offering fable-like gems capturing lives hurt and heroic, damaged and enduring. In "Blind Estrelinho," for instance, the title character learns about the world from stubborn guide Gigito, whose sister takes over when he's drafted. She opens her new charge to the possibilities of desire, and he consoles her when terrible news arrives by describing the world as he "sees" it. At a low point, Blind Estrelinho "remained on the side of the road, like a balled-up handkerchief soaked with sadness," and such language stuns throughout. A woman deserted by her husband, a problem child rushing to rescue her father--these are some of Couto's poignant stories. VERDICT Highly recommended.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2018

This stellar story collection from prolific Mozambican author Couto, a 2015 Man Booker International Prize finalist, initially appeared shortly after the 1992 end of his country's civil war. It does not, however, dwell on overt violence, instead offering fable-like gems capturing lives hurt and heroic, damaged and enduring. In "Blind Estrelinho," for instance, the title character learns about the world from stubborn guide Gigito, whose sister takes over when he's drafted. She opens her new charge to the possibilities of desire, and he consoles her when terrible news arrives by describing the world as he "sees" it. At a low point, Blind Estrelinho "remained on the side of the road, like a balled-up handkerchief soaked with sadness," and such language stuns throughout. A woman deserted by her husband, a problem child rushing to rescue her father--these are some of Couto's poignant stories. VERDICT Highly recommended.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2018
Stories about life in Mozambique after its civil war, reckoning with the damage via fable and folklore.This collection by Couto (Woman of the Ashes, 2018, etc.) was first published in Portuguese in 1994, two years after the end of a 15-year war that killed or displaced 6 million people. So the mood is understandably somber, but Couto is not interested in dwelling on carnage; in his introduction, he writes that he wishes to explore instead "the space where violence could not strike, where barbarism could not enter." That means the stories are more intimate tales of loss or of odd, Borges-ian incidents: A man is concerned that his pregnant wife's long labor signals she's cheated; the rain in the title story represents the end of the war years when "the gods reproached us with this drought"; a coconut reportedly spills blood instead of milk; a man turns his heavy drinking into an act of postwar religious meditation. All of the 26 stories are brief, usually running no more than five or six pages. And the plots are brush strokes, usually turning on themes of infidelity and the ways society has been upended after the war, be it through coping mechanisms (drinking and sex, usually) or more peculiar scenarios, as in "Beyond the River Bend," in which a hippopotamus breaks into a vocational school and contents itself "chewing through a sewing machine." Stylistically, Couto's writing is poker-faced, neither rejecting nor outright embracing the more surrealistic events he describes, though he does enjoy wordplay: Translator Becker ably preserves Couto's affinity for neologisms with puns like "timidiminutive," "mistified nights," "intirrigated," "airsfixiated." Not every coinage works, nor does every story, but the prevailing effect is, to quote one of his portmanteaus, "splendolorous": conveying a sense of profound loss flecked with a measure of optimism about life after the bloodshed is over.An impressionistic flash-fiction trek through the wreckage of war.

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