Haunting blend of magic and reality

Mia Couto's Under the Frangipani, with its curious blend of magic realism and crime fiction, draws upon that tradition.

The book opens with a dead narrator voicing his desire to revisit life. To achieve this, he inhabits the mind of a Mozambican police inspector who is investigating the murder of the director of an old people's refuge.

Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be getting very far. It isn't that none of the suspects is willing to own up. On the contrary, they're all equally eager to claim sole responsibility for the crime.

Initially, their self-alleged motives read as little more than clever digressions. But, taken together, these fabrications convey that the real victim is not the director but the Africa of yore that has been bled dry by colonialism, civil war and the influx of Western materialism.

There has been "a coup against the past," to borrow Couto's phrase. But denying the past, which constitutes the "bedrock" of the present, can only spell doom. Or at least that is how the author chooses to interpret modern existence, which the refuge inmates, as fast-fading symbols of history, battle vigorously to keep at bay.

By placing the fantastic and the illogical against the backdrop of the commonplace, Couto manages to de-familiarise familiar reality, thus conveying that things are seldom as they appear to be.

VIDISHA BISWAS