Under the Frangipani Mia Couto Serpent's Tail, 160pp, £10 ISBN 1852427299
To read Mia Couto is to encounter a peculiarly African sensibility, a writer of fluid, fragmentary narratives. His work is steeped in an oral tradition of storytelling, in which there is little to separate the real and unreal, the living and the dead. And yet Couto is a mzungu, a white man, the son of Portuguese parents, who stayed on in Mozambique after independence in 1975, making a life for himself there as a biologist.
Under the Frangipani (which is a tree) is narrated by a dead man, a restless spirit who moves in and out of the bodies of those occupying the site of a ruined Portuguese fort in what may or may not be Maputo, the former colonial city of Lourenco Marques, where once, wealthy white South Africans spent their holidays and where Lord Lucan was rumoured to have fled after murdering the family nanny. Admirably translated by David Brookshaw, this is a remarkable novel, in which the voice of the wandering spirit becomes a kind of collective consciousness, an expression of the melancholy history of Mozambique, a country of wars and occupation, as well as great resilience. And, as always in Couto, we never cease hearing above the babel of competing voices - the drowned Portuguese sailors, the murdered children and struggling women - the sound of the sea.
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