This time last year, I was all about fleeing this tropical misfit of a society, convinced I could no more make it in Brazil than I could in the icy stretches of Antarctica. Today, I’m a fluent Portuguese speaker (and writer!) and can think of nothing else than to read my next all original Portuguese language novel.
Why the change?
One of many factors is that only this year did I realize that to get a people you must read their writers. I stopped reading translations of other books (Eat Pray Love, Sophie’s World, Snow…. to name a few I’d picked up in their Portuguese version) and made it my business to read only native Brazilian, Portuguese, Mozambican, Angolan writers…. any book originally written in Portuguese.
I started light. Pulp novels. A couple children’s books by Monteiro Lobato. Then, a few essayists like Fernando Sabino. Some Luis Fernando Veríssimo satire. And for dessert, clippings out of the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, randomly picked over Sunday coffee.
It worked.
I started to get what I call the essence of “life in the Portuguese.” I realized how shallow my understanding of Brazil was without first seeing how it, and the Lusophone world, saw things. The only way to do such a thing from the position of an outsider is to read, read, read.
And so, after a few months of this, I picked up a book by Mia Couto. He’s from Mozambique and a difficult read – too poetic at times…magical realism, they call it. Too African at other times, where you just have to be Mozambican to understand him.
I read Couto’s Um rio chamado tempo, uma casa chamada terra (A River Called Time, on Amazon.com) with a Portuguese-to-Portuguese dictionary in my lap. The protagonist, a college student back home for the funeral his grandfather, talks “western” enough, but the massive load of aunts, uncles, secret lovers, and African lore around him gets difficult to interpret – a mix of dialect, colloquialisms, and Couto’s magical writing.
Which is why the book is so delicious.
Mia Couto’s pen is otherworldly. He writes about the mundane yet makes it seem fantastical. There’s an echo of teenage fantasy/sci-fi geek, if you look deep enough (but really deep!) and threads of Shakespeare if you’re just too classy for that.
On a personal level, Couto inspires me as a writer and makes me feel like I can live in the southern hemisphere, despite the struggle of always being an outsider. Couto is white, and an African, yet he doesn’t limit himself to the shackles of his European descent. He is who he is…fluid, in word and pen. Which is precisely why he’s #1 on my bookshelf.
See for yourself: Sleepwalking Land
It’s amazing.
