Short stories · A way to begin
Voices Made Night
Vozes anoitecidas
Mia Couto · 1986
Synopsis
Twelve short stories in which marginal characters, caught up in war and poverty, tell tales that brush against the marvellous and the absurd without quite leaving the real. In “Le Bûcher”, an old man tells his wife that they must start her grave, although she is not ill, and digs for two weeks, even in the rain. Elsewhere, the finest ox kept by Azarias, a young orphan, jumps on a mine, and the child, fearing his uncle's anger, runs off into the bush; Jossias, for his part, waits for a whale whose mouth will pour out provisions, without ever having seen one.
Context
The stories appeared first in Maputo in 1986, from the Association of Mozambican Writers, then in Lisbon in 1987, from Caminho. The book blends the register of speech with that of writing, a trait the publisher regards as foundational to the author's fiction. Several of these narratives passed into French in 1996 from Albin Michel, under the title Les Baleines de Quissico; the one about the child and the ox was brought to the screen in 2017 by Sol de Carvalho.
Who it is for
Brief stories, between the oral and the written, in a language that invents itself; in French, only a few can be read, in a wider selection.
Prizes and reception
This book made its author known outside Mozambique; David Brookshaw translated it into English in 1990, under the title Voices Made Night.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.