Bay of Tigers: a journey from Angola to Mozambique Pedro Rosa Mendes Granta Books, 320pp, £12.99 ISBN 1862074976

This book comes adorned with a recommendation by Ryszard Kapuscinski. So I opened it eagerly, having been in both Luanda and Maputo, and having taken a passing interest in Angola and Mozambique since they gained independence.

The history of the two former Portuguese colonies has not been edifying; it is a history smothered by apathy and disfigured by cruelty. The Portuguese were the first colonists of Southern Africa, starting from the 16th century. When their own revolution took place in the mid-1970s, they abandoned Africa: a million colonists returned to Portugal, and various factions fought it out in the ex-colonies. In both countries, the outcome has been horribly predictable: famine, corruption, poverty and regionalism. In Angola, a proxy war was fought between the communist bloc and the west, Cuba in the red corner and South Africa in the other. In Mozambique, a Marxist regime, Frelimo, triumphed in the end over Renamo, although its leader Samora Machel died prematurely in a plane crash. The country is now embracing the market economy. In Angola, since the death of the Unita leader Jonas Savimbi in 2002, there is a tentative peace.

I give this thumbnail sketch, because any reader of this book, appallingly badly translated from the Portuguese, will find that it is largely a record of impressions, many of them faux-literary, but containing very little coherent history (except in the inaccurate notes).

Pedro Rosa Mendes, a journalist, decided to make a land trip from one side of Africa to another - from Luanda, the capital of Angola, to Quelimane in Mozambique. His purpose, he says, was "the most noble of all - that is, I had no purpose in particular". We can infer that the purpose was to write an original, literary and impressionistic travel book. The problem is that it is so disjointed in its random collection of anecdotes, reflections, ironies and character sketches, as well as its high-flown but often meaningless apercus, that I found it torture to persevere. I was never sure who was speaking, or about whom they were speaking, or why. At times I wondered if I was being particularly obtuse, so I read the book again, and suffered the same frustration.

Bay of Tigers has had some success in Portugal. Clearly, it was written for a Portuguese audience, for which the detail of the colonial history and practice may well have a fascination. But I rapidly tired of turning to the glossary to find out, for example, that jango is an Umbundu word for a round or square roof, or that pumbo, in central Angola, is a market place. Why not simply write roof or market? But worse, I found myself mired in a literary style that I had imagined dead and buried: "How to explain a land with no life? No space, everything is limit and enclosure. The step to be taken is pointless, the step already taken was wrong. You could see the route of moons my heels left in the sand. From such a place one returns empty. The soul attenuates. It does not cross the river with me."

I am afraid my soul attenuated, too.

Justin Cartwright's most recent novel is White Lightning (Sceptre)

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