A Costa Dos Murmurios
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The Murmuring Coast
This captivating tale is told in two parts. The first presents Lidia Jorge's version of a traditional story about a series of supposed incidents set in Beira, Mozambique. The events take place in the final years of Portugal's colonial African wars as an undisclosed narrator describes the military wedding of a young Portuguese ensign and an equally young bride. The wedding is followed by the mass poisoning of hundreds of native Africans and the arrival of a rain of locusts. The story ends grimly with the groom's suicide. Evita Lopo, the unnamed bride from the first part, narrates the remainder of the story. Twenty years have gone by and she reviews the past and questions the unidentified narrator's rendering of events in the first section. Evita's reminiscences destroy the credibility of the earlier story, and she supplies the reader with a great deal of information that the author of the previous account had suppressed or to which he or she merely alluded. It becomes apparent that betrayal and guilt have motivated all of the characters' actions.
The Colonial Wars in Contemporary Portuguese Fiction
The Portuguese fiction that awakened public debate on imperialism The colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s and 1970s were Portugal's Vietnam. The novels discussed in this study, written by António Lobo Antunes, Lídia Jorge and Manuel Alegre among others, aroused passionate responses from the reading public and initiated a national debate, otherwise lacking in the contemporary press, with their systematic deconstruction of the rhetoric of patriotism and colonialism of António Salazar's regime. The author's approach is of necessity grounded in postcolonial thought, as these works represent the awakening of a post-imperial conscience in Portuguese literature and society. ISABEL MOUTINHO is a Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese at La Trobe University, Australia.
The Migrant Painter of Birds
The setting of this extraordinary novel is an old farmhouse in Portugal - a house far enough from the Atlantic not to hear the breaking waves during a storm but near enough for the walls to be corroded by the salt in the air. With most members of her large family having left the hardship of life in this landscape of sand and stone for jobs in faraway places, a young woman struggles to piece together her past from the many and differing stories she is told. Left behind by a free-spirited, feckless father, a seducer with a talent for drawing, she is raised by her uncle who has married her mother. The only memories of her father's one brief visit are the echoes of his footsteps on the stairs leading to her room. The only signs of him are letters from the widest reaches of the world- letters accompanied by brilliantly coloured drawings of exotic birds: the cuckoo from India, the ibis from Mozambique, the goose from Labrador, the hummingbird from the West Indies. The daughter longs for her father and, as she grows up, she is determined to find him and uncover the truth. Beautifully written and imagined, this strikingly lyrical novel evokes the atmosphere of a rural community in a changing world and explores the timeless themes of family, independence, and the often painful experience of emigration.