Sleepwalking Land
Muidinga, a boy taken out of a refugee camp with his memory gone, and Tuahir, the old man who claimed him there, make a home in a burnt-out bus on a road nobody travels, its other passengers still in their seats. In a dead man's suitcase Muidinga finds the notebooks of Kindzu, who left his village to look for the warriors of the sea, and he reads a chapter aloud each night while the country outside the bus quietly rearranges itself. Couto finished it as Mozambique's sixteen-year civil war was ending, in a Portuguese remade with Ronga and with compounds he invented, and it is generally counted the finest novel that war produced.
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- 41% · 11 shared
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