Some nice writing in here, but I didn’t fully connect with it. I enjoyed passages like:

That my mother might conceal things was something I was beginning to learn. For so many years, I had been like a little bird, gobbling the food, words and ideas, that she put directly into my mouth, already half-masticated. Now I began to consider what was real and what was not, what pleased me and what did not; I began dividing the world this way before swallowing. My mother glanced at the clock and said to eat up; she said that we hadn’t all day.

And:

He then spoke of karma and fate and said there were such forces in the world. He said not to get too attached, that nothing could go on forever. I thought I loved him but suddenly realized that this kind of love was a feeling that could pass, perhaps not without pain; that around it there were many lesser and greater worlds, none of them necessarily coincident with the other.

It’s a short novel to get through an entire childhood and adolescence, maybe 90 pages of actual text. Renders it impressionistic, emphasizing atmosphere over character. Reminded me of Renata Adler’s ‘Speedboat’, which I respect but couldn’t love. Knowing close to nothing about the history of Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Goa and the personalities and groups in conflict during the 1960s decolonization of Angola felt like a disadvantage. ( )

Saudade is a feeling of melancholy and nostalgia in Portuguese culture. In this novella, it is expressed in the story of a Goan family who have emigrated to Angola. The father is a labour lawyer who works for the Portuguese bosses while his Indian wife raises their daughter. The daughter is an eccentric who largely refuses to speak, and experiences racism at her convent school. The mother misses Goa while her daughter puzzles her way through her teens trying to find her own way in the world. As the Angolan independence movement grows, their lives come under increasing threat.

This is a good story, but I would really have liked to see it turned into novel length. I though the characters were worthy of more detail and the plot felt a bit cursory and rushed. Perhaps da Costa may revisit these people in a future work.

BTW, try not to read the blurb on the back of this book; it is full of spoilers.

( )

I'm always impressed when a super short book like this one is able to convey complex feelings and themes that other novels can't properly express in hundreds of pages. ( )

2020 TOB--Perfectly pleasant book but I'm not sure I got the point. It followed a girl's life from childhood to early adulthood. No spectacular feelings or events. ( )

There are many details here, despite being a novella, but to me they aren't the details that could be relevant to a family of colonizers who are living in Angola, Africa that are originally from Goa, India. The main character Maria-Cristina is a little naive, so if anything, the narrative kind of steps around the colonizing and the colonized. For example, the main character mentioning a gift the servant gives her, as it relates to her, but not mentioning much about the servant's life. But I understand this book isn't supposed to be about that. This is the main character's story. Possibly the writer didn't feel comfortable writing about the colonized. Instead, the book is like a fictional account of the experience of the writer's aunt who lived in Angola shortly before the Independence. But really, there are hardly any glimpses towards the colonizers or the colonized people of Angola. So without either perspective, it's hard to see this as a distinctive book as so many details remain out of the narrative. With "own voices" is it better to write from the perspective of the "victors" to further erase the colonized? Or is empathy more important? To be honest, I don't know enough about the history of Angola, so there were many gaps of knowledge and explanations that were missing to me. This isn't a history book --but it seems like too much history went unsaid. However, it's a short and sweet book to spend some time with Maria-Cristina. ( )