All of the 26 stories are brief, usually running no more than five or six pages. So the mood is understandably somber, but Couto is not interested in dwelling on carnage in his introduction, he writes that he wishes to explore instead “the space where violence could not strike, where barbarism could not enter.” That means the stories are more intimate tales of loss or of odd, Borges-ian incidents: A man is concerned that his pregnant wife’s long labor signals she’s cheated the rain in the title story represents the end of the war years when “the gods reproached us with this drought” a coconut reportedly spills blood instead of milk a man turns his heavy drinking into an act of postwar religious meditation. This collection by Couto ( Woman of the Ashes, 2018, etc.) was first published in Portuguese in 1994, two years after the end of a 15-year war that killed or displaced 6 million people.
Stories about life in Mozambique after its civil war, reckoning with the damage via fable and folklore.
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