A Companion to Mia Couto eds. by Grant Hamilton and David Huddart (review)

One of the main objectives of A Companion to Mia Couto is to make this author better known to the English-speaking world, highlighting the acclaimed works that have been celebrated in his native Mozambique as well as in Portugal and the United States where he won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, often considered to be a forerunner to the Nobel Prize. As the title suggests, the volume highlights and contextualizes key themes in Couto's work, such as trauma, orality, magical realism, and identity within a postcolonial Mozambique still coming to terms with the civil war that ensued after independence from Portugal. With this in mind, several of the chapters problematize the overly simplified classification of magical realism in the description of Couto's works (Brookshaw 19; Marques 65), stress the layering of utopian multiplicities as a means of blurring solid boundaries (Ashcroft 111), highlight the collective input in performativity as intervention into sociopolitical change (Madureira 32), and signal the process of subversions of his poetry as a challenge to dichotomous thought and rigid rationalism (Brugioni 51; Marques 82). Other chapters highlight the role of translation and global circulation (Helgesson 142), the structural inequality that results in the silencing of women in Mozambique (Rothwell 162), the dichotomy of a residual/globalized epistemology through translation (Mahlstedt 198), and animist realism as a counter to the artificial division of natural ecologies (Huddart 130).

The articles from multiple contributors in the volume edited by Grant Hamilton and David Huddart explore this writer's works through a wide range of theoretical perspectives and close readings of his writings, serving as both an introduction to the non-expert reader of Lusophone literatures of this Mozambican writer, as well as a contribution of new evaluations to the already substantial body of studies available on the author. Most significant in this overview of Mia Couto's work is the foregrounding of other aspects of his oeuvre, such as theater, poetry, and his short stories, usually omitted in critical literature or relegated to secondary status given his narrative prominence. As one of the contributors notes, Couto's short stories (crónicas) are a key aspect of the author's writings, constituting the background of his longer narratives in both content and form (Chabal 86). In his crónicas, says Chabal, Couto "achieves the greatest degree of literary originality, exhibits the most notable poetry, creates the most imaginative language, and reveals the most acute psychological insights" (86). While the poetic imagery of Couto's narrative has been a constant in its reception since his rise to fame, a number of contributors relate this trait to the author's lesser studied poetry collections, theater contributions, and short stories.

A Companion to Mia Couto is made up of an introduction, an interview with the author, and thirteen chapters, the last a bibliographic essay that orients the non-expert reader to the major issues in and approaches to Couto's work. This last chapter highlights the main didactic objective of the volume by providing an explanation of the principal themes in Couto's work, as well as short bibliographies that orient the lay reader to further studies. The book's structure is a clear indication of the editors' intent: the introduction and key chapters by Brookshaw, Chabal, Rothwell, Hamilton, and others serve as a continuation of expert studies on the author, while the interview literally presents the author to the lay reader, with the last chapter in particular providing a framework for understanding the topics raised by the editors. The broad overview of many of the chapters serves to contextualize the themes in the author's works, while raising new perspectives to enable further explorations and understandings of Couto's literary production. It is always difficult to present a writer to an audience who is not familiar with the author's work while making it of sufficient interest to those already familiar. This book tries to solve this dilemma through...