I have read another beautiful book.  I am amazed at my luck in finding so many beautiful novels, one after another.  Story tellers are not an endangered species; original and fresh writers are flourishing, from every country.  And we readers are the lucky recipients of their gifts.  Quite by coincidence, I read today another novel by a writer from a country once ruled by Portugal.  Two days ago , I read The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa from Angola.  Yesterday I read  Under the Frangipani (published in translation in 2001) by Mia Couto, from Mozambique.

Under the Frangipani is told by a narrator as interesting as the gecko in the Agualusa book: a dead worker who has been buried outside of the traditions and is thus doomed to suffer a kind of undeath.  But his suffering can be remedied, or so counsels the anteater who comes down from the sky to foretell fortune.  He can place himself within a living man soon to die and die with that man, once and for all.

And so begins the investigation of a murder.  Our dead man gains access to the body and mind of the policeman investigating the murder.  A kind of Rashomon of confessions occurs, with each character in the old people’s refuge where the murder took place claiming responsibility.  Each has their own unique (really unique, in some cases) reason for wanting the administrator of the old people’s home dead.

What becomes clear  in the various confessions is that the real danger is not the death of a man, but the death of memory (a theme also explored by Agualusa, from a different angle): “The real crime being committed here is that they are killing the world of the past…”  After the war for independence, instead of holding on to the ways of the African past, the new leaders are rushing to catch up with the west, and leaving the past to be forgotten, and becoming “people without a history, people who live by imitation.”

In contrast, the dead man is regaining memories, through the body of the inspector, and he is grateful: “Now, lodged in the body of a living person, I could remember everything, everywhere, everytime.  It was as I were on my way back, on a return journey.”

So is Mozambique caught in a sate of undeath?  Has the country lost its traditions, such as how old people are treated and how the dead are buried, and thus is losing a past without gaining a real future?   The oppressed overthrow the oppressor and then become like the oppressor: and all is lost, for all.  But there is hope at the end of this novel, offered in the flowering of a frangipani tree that had been left for dead.

I described The Book of Chameleons by Agualusa as a gem of writing. Under the Frangipani is like the rough stone of a warm gemstone, perhaps topaz or ruby, before it has been polished and cut to shine. The language is simple, straightforward, the sentences rough and even severe.  But the story is beautiful; it is fascinating and imaginative and left me satisfied. More than satisfied, I was awed, once again, by a genuine and moving and well-told story.

Under the Frangipani was translated by David Brookshaw.