Voices Made Night by Mia Couto

Suddenly, the ox exploded. It burst without so much as a moo. In the surrounding grass a rain of chunks and slices fell, as if the fruit and leaves of the ox. Its flesh turned into red butterflies. Its bones were scattered coins. Its horns were caught in some branches, swinging to and fro, imitating life in the invisibility of the wind.

One of my favorite stories from Mozambican writer Mia Couto's collection Voices Made Night is "The Girl with a Twisted Future": a poor man hears of a contortionist whose snake-like transformations attract gawkers from miles around, all willing to pay for the privilege of witnessing these oddities. The poor man instructs his daughter to begin practicing to be a contortionist, too; at night he straps her to a curved barrel so that her bones and spine will soften. It doesn't work, of course; the daughter becomes crippled and sick. When he brings her to see the contortionist's manager at last, he's told that contortionism is no longer the thing--what people want to see are steel teeth that can bite through anything. The poor man's schemes begin again, but his daughter's body is too ruined to match them.

The protagonist of Couto's stories are all like this poor man: dreamers made desperate for poverty, looking to make ends meet in absurd and uncanny ways. In "The Whales of Quissico," a man forsakes his life to go to the sea where he's been told beached whales will deposit whatever you wish for from their mouths. In "The Day Mabata-bata Exploded," an indentured cowherd runs from his boss because his herd's bull is exploded by the bird of lightning. In the first story, "The Fire," a man begins to dig his wife's grave before her death, because he's afraid he won't be able to afford a spade later, but the digging brings on an episode of fever that kills him instead. (The moments where he insists that his wife get in her grave before he dies, so that he can get his money's worth, speak to the viciousness poverty inculcates.)

Couto's stories have the air of fables or fairytales. Magical realism is often revealed as falsehoods: the storied whales are actually enemy submarines; the bird of lightning is a landmine. In "The Tale of the Two Who Returned From the Dead," two men who make their way back to their village after being carried away in a flood are informed that they cannot be accepted back into their village, because they have been declared legally dead and therefore must be ghosts. In "The Talking Raven's Last Warning," a raven tells people's fortunes, but only in a language its owner can hear. For Couto, magical realism is the language of poor men's dreams; impossible dreams that take impossible forms. Yet dreams have their power, too, as Couto shows in "The Ex-Future Priest and His Would-be Widow," about a woman who uses witchcraft to force her cold husband to please her sexually--though he can only do so while they are both dreaming.

These stories are small but powerful, and though they are quite fable-like, they avoid easy morals and clean lines; they eschew happy endings, and clear endings at all. It's easy to see why Couto's name comes up every year when Nobel Prize season rolls around. Among other things, these stories point toward the complex realities of a multiracial Mozambique, reeling from the history of Portuguese colonialism and the dictatorship of Salazar. I enjoyed them a lot.

With the addition of Mozambique, my "countries read" list is up to 75!