Amazon.com Review
When Angola achieved its hard-won independence in 1974, rival rebel factions began to fight for control of the state. As in Latin America, the "liberating" rebel forces were often as brutal as the autocratic, established regime. The result is a country still ravaged by unspeakable violence, corruption, and an ongoing power struggle. Portuguese journalist/author Pedro Rosa Mendes tells the story of modern-day Angola in
Bay of Tigers: An Odyssey Through War-Torn Angola. As Mendes's depiction makes clear, this is not the Africa of Elspeth Huxley or Isak Dinesen: "Through the night. There is no scenery, no villages, no people around fires, or elephants silhouetted against the sky. I could speak of such things, I was hoping to, but it would be a lie." Instead, we are presented with an array of stories and observations, often told in the voices of those Mendes interviewed during his 6,000-mile journey from Angola to Mozambique.
Although Mendes is journalist, he sustains a magic-realist tone throughout the book: "It was when the mine smashed into the road that Zeca realized he was dead." However, he punctuates his imagery-laden language and vignettes with chilling facts: "There are more than one hundred million mines buried in seventy countries, close to a tenth of them in Angola." The reader must tread uneven ground in the book. Mendes does not provide an easy-to-follow narrative. History mixes with the present, in this multi-voiced story of shifting alliances, unimaginable devastation and destruction. Mendes provides a glossary that supplies historical context for those who are not familiar with Angola's complex history. Considering the hardships that Mendes endured during the course of his trip, one wonders why he saw it through to the end. Then, one thinks of the long-suffering people of Angola to whom he gives voice and for whom these hardships are an everyday reality that will not soon disappear, and one understands why. --Silvana Tropea
From Publishers Weekly
Four decades of civil war have left Angola a shattered country, an unpublicized catastrophe where land mines outnumber people and children play with surface-to-air missiles. Mendes went there in 1997, a Portuguese journalist investigating his nation's former colony. This extraordinary, difficult book is a record of the horrors he found: an infant without a face, a young beggar who resembles a little five-year-old man, amputees lining up for electroshock therapy. The book's structure is as chaotic as the country. Mendes forgoes any kind of conventional approach, lurching backward and forward through time, switching points of view, quickly introducing then discarding characters. It would be frustrating if it weren't done with such evident purpose: the fractured, phantasmagoric depiction of a world gone mad. Mendes has a gift for wry observation (a colonel blissfully sleeping the sleep of his rank) and surreal imagery (a plush animal dangles crucified from the wire), both of which well suit his subject. Equally valuable is Mendes's evident compassion for those he encounters. His description of a blind musician patching a guitar with chewing gum, for instance, tells much about the musician, but also reveals Mendes's superb observational skills. The book's principal drawback is that it doesn't supply the context of postcolonial African history. Those who don't have that i.e., most people will find the book tough going. (A glossary offers some help, but it's not enough.) Still, Mendes has crafted a unique, frightening book. Composed equally of journalism, oral history and even magic realism, it shows how people can endure and even prevail despite their government's best efforts to keep them down.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
