Upon learning that I had never read Mia Couto, indeed, hadn't heard of him at all, several of my friends reacted with a mix of shock, pain, and pity. How could I dare reside in (albeit, illegally), contemplate visiting, or even get on a plane traveling in the general direction of Mozambique without having fully absorbed Mia Couto's complete body of work? Although, as it turned out, most of them only had a passing familiarity with his work; more a conception of his importance, rather than an understanding.

From the NYT Review:
"The Last Flight of the Flamingo" takes shape as a wry, poignant fable about any society lost in translation, any society sent through the ideological wringer by colonists, Marxist-Leninists, counterrevolutionaries, NGO's, globalizing capitalists and authoritarian kleptocrats. As the novel's narrator observes of his people's mangled identity, "We hadn't understood the war, and now we didn't understand the peace."

And that really sums it up. Each time I picked up the book, I felt as though I were reading through a feverish haze, a testement not just to the writing, but to the English translation as well. It is evocative of time and place, but also of the emotions and apprehensions that we see them through.