Sleepwalking Land

This is an excellent, classic-grade novel but how do we get folks to find out about a work set in Mozambique, written in 1992 and translated from the Portuguese in 2006? Mozambique is a former Portuguese colony; that Indian Ocean country on the east coast of Southern Africa that "fits around" the broken-off island of Madagascar. This novel takes us back to the 1970's when a war of independence against colonial Portugal disintegrated into civil war, and ultimately, simply into banditry and chaos. Bands of soldiers murdered, raped, burned and plundered across the countryside with no plan or logic.The plot is simple. A young boy and old man are survivors sheltering in a burned-out bus, from which they removed charred bodies to make it habitable. The boy may be the man's son or his nephew or they may be unrelated. Every day they wander around their home base looking for food or other living souls and avoiding gunmen. So it is very much like  The Road  by Cormac McCarthy. The boy dreams of finding his parents but his companion warns him not to even think of it because children are such a burden to parents in this strife-torn land. One story is that the boy has no memory of his early life because he was taken to a witchdoctor to empty his head of the horrible memories. They encounter a man who spend his time spinning sisal to make a rope to hang himself. An old woman in a refugee campus spends all her time in heavy physical labor because she knows she will be abandoned once she is no longer useful. Even death does not bring relief; a ghost, a perhaps the boy's father's, tells his son: "I'm dead but disconsolate." "But our fate is that of a mat: history will wipe its feet on our backs."On the bus, the boy finds a journal kept by a young passenger and each night he reads chapters to the old man. So nightly journal entries alternate with sequences about their daily activities. Couto gives us dream-like sequences of horror laced with magical realism. Here is a selection of literary gems from a couple of dozens I marked while reading, that show the power of his writing. "...dreams are letters we send to our other, remaining lives." "Pain ... is a window through which death peers at us." "We make our way toward death in the same way a river unbodies itself into the sea: one part of it is being born and, at the same time, the other is entering the infinite shadowlands." "He who lives in fear needs a small world, a world he can control." "He frowned, as if his thoughts might escape through his eyes."We learn a lot about folk beliefs: "chissila," a curse that punishes you; "xipocos," ghosts that take joy from your suffering -- they wander in chaos because they don't know where the border is between the dead and the living; "mampfana," birds that kill journeys; "tchoti," dwarfs who drop from heaven;Find this book and read it.

It's almost impossible to describe how beautiful this book is. An old man and a boy leave a refugee center in Mozambique and camp in a burned out bus on the road. They find a suitcase with a diary and the book alternates between what is happening to the old man and the boy, and what the the boy is reading in the diary. It has one of the most moving endings I've ever read. Are there any more stories, the old man asks the boy. And the boy says no, there are no more stories. What is death by the end of story?

This book revels in magic realism, but does it much less effectively than other colonial authors. I would recommend Heart of Redness instead.

A wonderful book

Having background of the Mozambiquan civil war in which this is set helped to place the imagery and elements of the "fantastic/fantasy." I would recommend spending 15-20 minutes reading about Mozambique's modern history before reading this novel so you can enjoy it better. The Portuguese original has a lot of beautiful word play that doesn't translate into English.

It surprised me.

The writing knocked me out. Couto's use of language is unique and off-kilter in a way that makes you think. This is not really a mystery or a dystopian adventure. It is the story of survival in hellish circumstances.

Mia Couto's Sleepwalking Land is set during Mozambique's civil war, but it is not a novel specifically about Mozambique, it's about the entire post-colonial continent. This is a land where the past and present war for control of the future. Or perhaps it's not as grand as all that. Maybe it's just cruel and greedy people killing each other, or desperate people fighting in any way they can to survive. In the end it doesn't matter what the war is about; all that matters is that there is war.An old man and a young boy, Tuahir and Muidinga, travel a "dead" road trying to get away from the war. They take shelter in a burnt out bus, and there find the notebooks of another traveler, Kindzu. The notebooks describe Kindzu's own journey to escape the war, and every night Muidinga reads the story to Tuahir. In alternating chapters we are treated to these parallel journeys, and as the story progresses, as it gets stranger and stranger, these two narratives begin to intertwine.Sleepwalking Land is a work of Magic Realism, and as such Couto, perhaps inevitably, gets compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But this is a distinctly African work, and has much more in common with the works of Ben Okri. Perhaps we can call it "Animist Realism". Though I find Couto to be more in control of his novel than Orki was with The Famished Road; the story is tighter, the prose more precise. If you're looking for something a little different, something both strange and profound, give Sleepwalking Land a try.

Amazing story from an outstanding author.