Honestly not quite sure what to make of this. I think much of it escaped me; I simply did not follow or understand some of his symbolism. Some I got. The writing is good, the story fascinating (aspects of it remind me of Life of Pi) but it leaves me feeling confused and incomplete, like the only other book of his I’ve read, the collection Rain: And other stories. I’m not certain I’ve begun with the “right” books and if someone wants to straighten me out and make a recommendation, I’m definitely willing to read more. But as it stands, I suspect that Mr. Couto and I may not be a match. ( )

Mozambique's FRELIMO led War of Independence against Portugal was bad enough, but at least it held out the hope of a better future for the people. The civil war which followed held no such promise. As usual, it was everyday people who suffered most.

Opening the novel with a young boy and an old man on the road, Coutu writes in images.

They walk with swaying gait, as if journeying has been their only occupation since birth. Their destination is the other side of nowhere, their arrival a non-departure, awaiting what lies ahead. They are fleeing the war, the war that has contaminated their whole country. They advance under the illusion that somewhere beyond there lies a safe country....
The two travellers matched the road, withered and devoid of hope.

The boy, Muidinga, was recovering from a terrible illness that left him all but dead. The man, Tuahir, had found him abandoned in the refugee camp, and taken him under his wing when no one else would. Both were starving.

As they wandered along, they found a burnt out bus, its dead passengers still inside. A lone man lay dead on the road outside, shot to death. What better place to shelter than a burned out wreck? They buried the dead and settled in. The man on the road had had a series of notebooks with him, telling his story.

As the days passed, Muidinga, who could read a little, read them to Tuahir, gaining confidence as he went. Kindzu was the name of the boy in the notebooks, a boy who had grown up on the Mozambique coast, a new and exotic world to Muidinga.

The man and boy spent much of their time looking for food, water, and firewood, but both looked forward to the readings. Couto alternates the day to day life with these readings. However, as time goes on, a wonderful magic realism creeps in, bit by bit, blurring the lines between the two stories. Is the highway with the burnt out bus moving through the land? Roads should be still, "waiting for men's journeys". Which story does each boy actually belong in? Who is Tuahir?

This is indeed a sleepwalking land; one where travellers dream and hallucinate their way through on their way to unknown destinations.

In a war-devastated landscape, an old man and a boy set up camp provisionally in a burnt-out bus. There they find a suitcase containing a stack of notebooks, the story of a young man called Kindzu, who has set out to find his father, lost at sea in the aftermath of the war. The two stories carry on in parallel, punctuated by encounters with one-eyed giants, sorceresses, beaches and all that kind of thing.

There's a lot of Homer going on here, and a certain amount of Ovid, but it's Homer and Ovid as they might have written if they'd grown up in the Southern Hemisphere and known about Samuel Beckett and Gabriel García Márquez. And it's all going on in a very distinctively African way, which feels coherent and enjoyably puzzling, not at all like a literary exercise. Couto draws us into the terror of living in that kind of war-destroyed world, where there are no longer any certainties you can count on, and the best you can do is try to retain some shreds of human dignity. Even when all quests ultimately fail and promises can't be kept, Couto wants us to see that the attempt to live like a human being and not like a beast is already a blow against the negative forces of the war. ( )

A haunting but, for me, difficult to absorb, book about the total disruption in families and cultures caused by war, specifically the civil war in Mozambique. Couto, who is the descendant of Portuguese colonists, seems to have a deep understanding of the myths and culture of native Mozambicans, but he relies so heavily on magical realism that I felt I was really missing most of the symbolism.

A young boy and man are refugees from a guerrilla civil war who happen upon a bombed and burned bus. They seek shelter in the bus, but what they discover changes their quality of life. They find 10 notebooks belonging to a man that may or may not be one of the dead people on the bus. What unfolds is an African Odyssey - the man in the notebooks and our two characters are taken on a dream-like adventure.

I thought the folklore and the tall-tales were just enough. It added to the story tremendously in the way of using imagination as a coping method in such horrific circumstances. For instance, in one part of the book, the two happen upon a man who is trying to make a river. He has dug over hills and through mountains. He wants to make a river so his village can be prosperous. The two decide to help him dig, but then the sky opens up and torrential downpour descends. The man attempting to make the river falls into his river, which is now a churning rapid-like mud pit. Everything he just dug is leveled out, in the way water levels sand - with him under it.

This was sort of a re-occurring theme. Some characters were trying to become Westernized and "civilized" and "own" the Earth, but it is always fruitless.

All in all, I loved it and think it a very worthy book of anyone's time. ( )