A review by blueyorkie
A Costa dos Murmúrios by Lídia Jorge

3.0

Set during the colonial war, questions from the reflection on a story entitled "The Locusts" search modes of historical truth and, consequently, of novelistic fact. In this questioning of the meanings of history and of history itself, there is a concept of time in contemporary history, composed of different times, which relativize all times, search for the "invisible muscles" that "can have an exceptional performance in the organization of historical facts ". The truth about the history of the colonial war, the discrepancies between the history of colonizers and the history of the colonized, amplifying the story of The Locusts, presents itself as an enigma that Eva Lopo tries twenty years later to unravel, remembering how she tried to scream truths that should have been, like the intimate feelings and aspirations of the characters, only murmured: the truth about the poisoning process of the natives with methyl alcohol bottles, perhaps financed by the South African Government to promote white independence in the Portuguese colonies; or the truth about the intervention of the Portuguese soldiers in the colonial war, the barbarities committed, when "nobody could indicate if it was grandiosity or pettiness the impulse of the people who beheaded the heads of the others and spat them in clubs. The Constable would have done so, the Founder much worse." From symbolic opposition of spaces to the logic of identity and dissimilarity that underlies the functionality of the pairs and the (loving) triangles of characters, nothing retracted. Still, it confirms powerful writing in the contemporary renewal of narrative processes.