This author is from Mozambique (SE coast of Africa, bordering Tanzania in the north and South Africa in the south). The book is basically a story of the struggle of one woman to keep her man, who is apparently irresistible to women and has no interest in monogamy.
I thought it was hilarious and poetic and also representative of a culture so different from ours that if you were to make a list of books representing cultures by how different they are, this one would have to go at the top. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was not about a more different society. Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, which is (at least to me) basically a machine for turning an American into a Turk, is less dramatically different, by about half.
In fact, the way the author thinks of her life, the way the people she tells us about think of their lives, they approach society and themselves so differently that I think the book must be an education even to a psychologist. It seems to reveal a new dimension of perception of humanity. If properly considered. I did not know people could behave like this. I didn't know it was possible to think this way. The poetry I'm used to, by comparison, seems to me now to hammer down along the path across its images (Frost said a poem is a tune or a ground of images, across which we may choose to strike a path) as though it were laying rail. The poetry she tells flies like a bird. Like a flock of birds, actually.
It's different. I won't forget it. I hope not, anyway!! At one point our heroine was "well and truly kutchingered," and you'll have to read the book to learn more about THAT, but I'm sure the search will be worth while lol…
by tolkienfan2759