Thanks to #NetGalley and #FSG for providing me with an advanced copy of The Cartographer of Absences by Mia Couto.

See that over there. Yeah those are my socks that were blown off by this book. Wow. What an unexpected experience TCoA turned out to be. I intentionally went into the book blind and am thrilled with that decision because as soon as I cracked this book (well more like clicked since it’s an ebook but that’s neither here nor there) I was transported to a whole new world.

This is my first time reading Couto and after finishing this book I immediately logged into my library account and put holds on all of his books in their catalogue. You may be asking yourself, well what’s the reason for this admiration, and ladies and gents it’s due to the author's masterful exploration of colonialism in Mozambique and its present-day impacts. It’s due to the too often untold stories of women and queer people who played critical roles in the fight against colonialism, and it’s to honor those who died in the massacres that occurred in the dying breaths of the colonizers hold on the nation.

All of this is packaged in a meta fictional form that takes the reader through past and present in ways that urge you to keep turning the page.

My sincere gratitude to #NetGalley and #FSG for providing me with an advanced copy of The Cartographer of Absences by Mia Couto.

This is my first Couto. I'm not sure why, but despite being aware of him, I haven't read any of his novels until now. He is even considered a candidate for a Nobel each year (though I'd choose Antunes without a second thought). It's an extremely smart exploration of absences: colonialism and its aftermath in Mozambique, the contemporary reverberations of colonialism, those who fought against colonialism (especially women and queer people), those who died during the final days of colonial rule (I didn't know about the massacres in Mozambique and thought such horrors were limited to Belgian colonial rule, but apparently not), and who gets to tell the story and own the historical narrative. All of this is packaged in a metafictional form that plays with different literary forms and what they can make present or absent. I'm excited to explore Couto's oeuvre after this novel.