![]() That’s not always to his credit stories often don’t end so much as drift to lyrical conclusions his recent Sands of the Emperor Trilogy ( Woman of the Ashes, 2018, etc.) is on sturdier historical footing. ![]() Stories drawn from the collection Rain: And Other Stories(2019) deal more explicitly with Mozambican history, specifically its civil war that ran from the 1970s through the '90s, but he’s more interested in conjuring a melancholy mood. ![]() Shape-shifting abounds: A heart gives birth to a child in “The Child’s Heart and the Heart’s Child” while a man’s wife takes the form of multiple women in “Ezequiela, Humanity,” much to the husband’s pleasure and, eventually, fear. In “The Flagpoles of Beyondwards,” an allegory about the impossibility of isolation from outside forces, a man tries to protect his daughter from a visitor’s attention. “The Tale of the Two Who Returned From the Dead” is about just that, about two apparitions caught up in the local bureaucracy. Despite that breadth, Couto’s concerns, and much of his style, have remained consistent: He focuses on the inner lives of everyday people, usually with a twist involving mysticism or superstition. Many of the stories here appear in English (from the Portuguese) for the first time, drawing from works first published in 1986 to a clutch of new material. A career-spanning collection from the Mozambican writer, seeking an intersection between his country’s folklore and its colonial past. ![]()
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