From Booklist
The shocking first sentence is enough to tell you that this will be one strange mystery: "To put it crudely and rudely, here's what happened: a severed penis was found right there on the trunk road just outside Tizangara." UN soldiers in Mozambique have been inexplicably and incredulously exploding, leaving nothing behind but their blue peacekeeper helmets and their "fleshy hyphens." Italian UN official Massimo Risi arrives to investigate this phenomenon, along with his local translator and guide. A bumbling administrator, his haughty wife, and the town's prostitute add flavor to what is essentially the story of a country learning to work the capitalist system ("our destitution is turning a good profit") while trying to keep foreign influence at bay. The surreal haze of folkloric superstitions and raw sensuality akin to Nuruddin Farah's
Secrets permeate the tales that the Tizangara translator and narrator collects. Couto creates a striking portrait of postcolonial Africa; unfortunately, his larger messages tend to get sullied with the inherent shock value of his crude plot device.
Misha StoneCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Description
“A wonderful mix of magical realism and wordplay that has a similar tone to Márquez at his best. Couto writes in an idiom all his own that feels authentically African.”—Ink
In Mozambique after the end of the civil war, local soldiers have been unaccountably blown up. When it begins to happen to UN peacekeepers, a high-level delegation visits the village of Tizangara to initiate an investigation. As the UN investigation unfolds, Mia Couto brilliantly shows how the perceptions of events both inside and outside the country are altered when interpreted from an African perspective.
Mia Couto was born in 1955 in Mozambique and is the most prominent Portuguese-speaking African writer. He now lives in Maputo, where he manages the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.