Customer Reviews

Alentejo Blue

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I bought this book because my mother lives in the Alentejo. I intended to read it and then send it to her. But I'm struggling to even finish it. I'm a college graduate, and I've read plenty of complex novels, but this one leaves me feeling like I'm missing some skill necessary to decode it. I think I need an English Literature class in order to understand it, and frankly, I don't want to put that much work into reading for pleasure. There are too many characters, with too little to tie them together, and sentences thrown in at the end of paragraphs that leave me thinking "huh?"

Others clearly love this book, so I realize this is just a mismatch between reader and style of book. But I thought I should write a review so that others who want plenty of accessible plot in a book know to look elsewhere.

I bought this book because I was born and raised in the Alentejo and I was so anxious to read about familiar places and perhaps to better understand my own culture.
I hate to say this but I read perhaps 20 pages, if that. Nothing made sense to me, and there was no flow. I actually returned the book to the store.
So sorry to say this but I would definitely not recommend it to anyone.

Five Mesmerizing Stars!! Monica Ali's wonderfully conceived sophomore effort transcends the Bangladeshi roots of her debut novel "Brick Lane" by a considerable distance, physically and topically. She transports us to the village of Mamarrosa Portugal in the southeastern rural area of Alentejo and a tangle of lives and events played against the country's historical, social, and economic factors. In so doing, she elevates herself from a writer who can very convincingly write about her own background to someone who can conjure up a totally different stage, across a wide swath of time, and reveal the innermost workings of other cultures and characters. And in the "acknowledgements" she tells us she's spent time in rural Portugal and studied the language, and it clearly shows in her wonderful writing! Not 'chick lit', it's 'Wonderful Lit'! 'Saudade' (a Portuguese word which appromixates 'sadness/hopeful longing') hangs in the air, hence the "Blue" for atmosphere (and a local paint color), but it's not a turn off. It's exactly like taking a short vacation in a rural town in a foreign land, full of quaint, interesting, interlaced characters that you take as they come, soak up some history and the local sights, and then you go home, better off for the experience! There are no murders, spies, or insidious terrorist plots.

Roughly-hewn, beautifully complex characters abound. And her prose can be spellbinding, whether she's writing about dictatorships, the vagaries of love, or an almond tart. A few crude situations are present. I like the way she drops us into a scene and slowly makes us aware of where we are and what's going on. The verbiage of some of the Portuguese characters is somewhat obtuse at times, almost like a translation, but certainly not difficult to follow and it does transmit a certain cultural mindset, which is significantly different from the foreign characters in the novel.

Shifting timeframes (67 years) and situations within her first vignette on Joao and Rui, the reader is introduced to the hardships and complexities of a friendship that begins during the Salazar dictatorship and actually ends at the beginning of the vignette. Then she makes an even bigger temporal and topical shift to current day Portugal and the complex story lines of the ex-patriots and tourists, and the differences within their worlds around the village of Mamarrosa. And then there are the local citizens with their fascinating stories, some staying, some escaping and some unable to: the scene between Joao and Teresa, juxtaposing the old and the new, the settled and the unsettled is flat out beautiful writing. It's an example of islands of especially lyrical prose that pop up everywhere in this novel. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is no resolution coming in a chapter, just the exhilaration of the wonderful prose and great descriptions of the villages and countryside and it's inhabitants, but that is not always so. But it doesn't matter if there is a destination or not, the ride is enjoyable. Watch for the shifts from third person to first person. In Chapters 8 & 9, one may be exhilarated that one is actually reading something this good, as it flows beneath our eyes. But can she tie it all together? Yes, near the end, there are surprises and recapitulations.

In summary, a wonderful read about an engrossing fictional world and village. The grandmother was right: "We live our lives!" and this is 'life', but would these characters make the same choices and mistakes given another chance in Mamarossa Portugal? I think so! Monica Ali is one heck of a Big League writer. I couldn't get enough of this novel!!
Highly recommended. Five Engrossing Stars!!!

(Note: *This review is based on an EBook download in Adode Reader 7. Save a tree, download your books when possible.)

"Alentejo Blue" can best be described in the same way a sports commentator described the Portuguese National Foorball Side, "always full of promise, but never lives up to its promises."

There are a number of laudable elements in Monica Ali's prose.It is very spare, and her novel shows a great deal of work and refinement. The novel, however, seems to suffer on it's attempt to maintain coherency. There is no "plot" as such, as the book is a series of vignettes that are connected primarily through sharing the space and time of a certain moment in a certain Alentejo village- but very often these vignettes fail to connect to one another. It seems as if there is a great novel hidden within "Alentejo Blue", but it never quite comes out. The reader is given a series of character sketches that clearly could develop into something interesting, but never quite get there.

Her English characters are generally believable, and relatively well fleshed out, but the Portuguese characters are far less believable. It is clear that Ali has a deeper than passing familiarty with Portugal, in her use of quotes from the Portuguese language and reference to place names, but Her Portuguese characters feel entirely English. Their "Portugueseness" is entirely lamina, and thus the division between the foreigners and the locals is unconvincing. All the characters remain foreign to the reader. In addition, there are a few glaring errors of language usage, such as when the character of Vasco uses English phrasing, rather than American, despite the fact that he lived in the United States and was married to an American wife.

In fact, though this is a novel that ought to be attached to a specific time and place, it really never convincingly references its locus. It might just as easily have been set in Brighton.

The beginning of the book belies this, the first scene references the death of an old man's former male lover, and reminisces about Salazarist Portugal. It seems by this that Ali wants to connect the dysfunctions of alentejo village life to the repression of Salazarist history (in a postscript she also recommends a book concerning Salazar) but this very interesting opening segment, surprisingly, is never returned to or even alluded to in the rest of the novel. A much better job of this sort of thing is done in Robert Wilson's "A Small Death in Lisbon."

Also, the final climax of the novel is, well, anti-climactic and not terribly believable. It's hard for tensions to explode, when tension has never really been succesfully built up.

Overall, I am always glad when Portugal gets some "press" in the literary world, but I would wait to buy this one until it goes on sale.

EXCEPT FOR THE TWO MAIN CHARACTERS OF THE FIRST CHAPTER (AND ONE OF THEM DEAD), I WAS UNABLE TO REMEMBER MOST OTHERS WHEN THEY STROLLED IN AND OUT OF THE ACTION. PERHAPS BECAUSE MANY WERE SO UNLIKEABLE.

OCCASIONALY, HOWEVER, THERE WOULD BE A FINE CRAFTED SENTENCE.

I have to agree with you Liz. I have just finished this book, but only as a result of grit and determination. There are some snippets of beauty hidden in her descriptions of everyday people and their antics, but I also felt like I was somehow missing out on something, so much so that I checked to see if my copy was indeed a complete one and had all of its pages.
It is a collection of mini stories that don't really start anywhere, and then don't really go anywhere. You are left thinking "well, what about...?", but then a few seconds later you realize that you don't really care after all.

This book is more a series of short stories with recurring and interconnected characters than it is a novel. Here in a tiny town in Portugal, the poorest province in the poorest nation in (western) Europe, are assembled a cast of characters who are locals, tourists and émigrés, mainly from Britain. The author, a native of Bangladesh, living in London, shows us personally as well as by her characters just how globalization is impacting even remote corners of the world.

One would think the locals couldn't wait to leave this god-forsaken corner of the earth, and some are trying to leave. But one local has returned from a decade as a cook and bartender in the Portuguese emigrant community in Provincetown, Massachusetts and he has no intention of ever leaving his Portuguese village again. One of the émigrés is an alcoholic author. One émigré family that features a pot-head father, lost son, promiscuous mother and promiscuous underage daughter, is so dysfunctional they could star in their own reality TV show. The underlying theme seems to be you can run but you can't hide (from yourself); even more so in a small rural village.

The Blue in the title, (from the blue in the Portuguese azulejos tiles) is a give-away - these are depressing stories filled with angst and anomie. One could argue that depressing small-town stories constitute their own genre. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson; Village by Robert McAlmon; Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, and Tales from the Mountain by Miguel Torga - also set in Portugal - all come to mind. Ali gives us depressing stories, but, in short, brilliant stories. The final chapter featuring a feel-good village festa can't erase all that comes before and seems a bit disingenuous.

I found this book not up to par with "Brick Lane" and couldn't get into it. There are so many other books worth reading.

Books and the appreciation of the written word is an intergral part of my profession. So,both for work, and for pleasure, I read avidly. The joke is that I, personally, keep amazon in business. When I heard of this book, set in the Alentenjo, I hurried to order it. It arrived yesterday, and here I am , done already and feeling it was a TOTAL waste of time and money.

Ali has no clue how to create a story- oh sure, the novel begins intriguingly enough with Joćo finding the man he had craved for years hanging from a cork tree, a suicide at age 84, but then NOTHING is ever developed with this story line. Joćo shows up again as a blithering old man with a pet pig, and then again drinking a toast to Rui, but it does NOTHING to help connect the myriad of other characters and their "stories"(term used loosely!)who pop up out of nowhere with no tie in to anything that has already happened, save for the fact that they all live in Mamarrosa!
I read the first 120 pgs (already struggling to do so) but had to fight to finish the book for the remainder.
I have never said this about a book, but will say it here and wish I could use a stronger adjective (read: "expletive"). Alentejo Blue is a piece of TRASH.

Please do not bother!!!

I wanted to like this book, but I, like several other reviewers, had to struggle to finish it, and it is a short book. Although the jacket blurb promises that all the characters will be "...brought together, and their jealousies and disappointments inevitably collide." as though Mamarrosa were a unifying point for all the characters and their stories. This does not prove to be the case. Nothing cataclysmic happens at the end. The much-heralded return of Mamarrosa's prodigal son does not add to the plotline. In fact, who is Marco Alfonso Rodrigues? There is little or no background on his life before he left the village to explain why everyone has such expectations of him. He says little, most of it obscure. His leavetaking is anticlimactic. Perhaps as Vasco says, "You know, the moment I saw him, I said to myself 'hippie'. And that is what he is." And perhaps Marco Alfonso is a hippie, albeit one with more serenity about him than the other old hippie expat, China Potts, who is addled by alcohol and marijuana.
Nothing in particular is revealed/resolved in the end, no plotlines tied up, except perhaps the relative reunification/redemption of the expatriate Potts family, the only expat characters who seem to interact much with the villagers. Several of the stories just peter out: does Teresa, the village girl ultimately leave the village for the au pair job in France? Do Huw and Sophie postpone their wedding, or break off their engagement in the end? Teresa has slept with her sweetheart, Francisco for the first time (She wants to leave the village as a woman.), but then afterward with Vincente who is engaged to her friend Clara. What is that about? Francisco is supposed to be her sweetheart, but after they spend the night together, he seems less interested in her. (My mother cautioned me that many men are like that.) Teresa's original plan is to break off with Francisco when she leaves anyway. Although she never does tell him this, he almost seems to have anticipated her. It seems that sleeping with him, her first experience, merely now makes her available to sleep with anyone. Was that her intent in leaving the village as a woman? None of the characters seems to have any particular purpose in life, except for Teresa who wants to leave for the au pair job, but even she seems to be unclear as to what she ultimately wants. Antonio is content to be an auto mechanic; Vicente and Clara who are engaged, do not seem to be really bonded, at least Vincente isn't.
Huw and Sophie don't seem to be all that sure that they should marry at all.
Ali introduces a different story every chapter, but one needs to get fairly far into the chapter to discover who is being introduced; how each new character or pair of characters fits into the story is unclear. What are they supposed to find in Mamarrosa? If this were a book of short stories, it would not matter, but these stories are all supposed to intersect in the village.
This book has been touted as one of the literary sensations of this summer. I cannot see what all the shouting was about.