Sleepwalking Land, Mia Couto’s first novel, was published in 1992 and later named by a jury at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair as one of the 12 best African books of the 20th century. It has now been translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw. Set in Mozambique, it is about a boy, Muidinga, and an old man, Tuahir, who shelter from civil war in a burnt-out bus. Among the charred passengers and worthless chattels they find a set of notebooks which tell the fantastical life-story of an itinerant boy named Kindzu. Muidinga, who is immediately fascinated by the notebooks, reads a passage each day to Tuahir, who initially feigns lack of interest but is soon also captivated.
The novel’s chapters alternate between the present-day narrative and the story told by the notebooks. Couto is influenced by the magic realism of post-colonial Latin America, but his novel has echoes, too, of the European ‘literary shaggy-dog story’, which runs from Tristram Shandy to, in more recent times, Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. By mixing two such sharp flavours, Couto creates a novel which occasionally seems intoxicated by its own style, but Sleepwalking Land is none the less a colourful, arresting tale.
Cold Skin by Albert Sánchez Piñol, Canongate, £9.99, pp. 233, ISBN 1841956880; The Amnesia Clinic by James Scudamore, Harvill Secker, £11.99, pp. 275, ISBN 184343306; Five Amber Beads by Richard Aronowitz, Flambard Press, £10.99, pp. 224, ISBN 1873226802; Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto, Serpent’s Tail, £9.99 , pp. 213, ISBN 185242897X.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.