Paulo da Costa

The loosely structured stories collected in Paulo da Costa’s volume The Green and Purple Skin of the World tell of attitudes and emotions that force people apart and bring them together. Love and family provide the starting point for many of these fictions, which largely eschew overt drama in favour of a kind of quiet lyricism. In “The Table” a young man has bought a new table at IKEA to replace the ancient battle-scarred table in his mother’s kitchen, and the argument that ensues derives from their differing perspectives on the past, on memory, and on new versus old. In “My Real Mother Would Never,” nine-year-old Mara runs away from home because she regards her mother’s attachment to her boyfriend Kurt as a betrayal and is annoyed that her feelings and wishes are always being ignored. And in “Immortality,” Vera, after an absence of many years, has returned home to celebrate Christmas with her family and try to reconcile with her parents, especially her mother, who is ill. But Vera’s complex backstory, which includes being thrown out of the house at sixteen and an unwanted pregnancy that she had to deal with on her own, prevents her from granting her mother’s dying wish: that she have a child. Of the remaining stories—some of which are brief to the point that they come across as fragmentary—several explore parent-child and husband-wife relationships under emotionally fraught or unusual circumstances. The outlier in the collection is “Those Who Follow.” Set in a forest in the Canadian West, it is written primarily from the perspective of a cougar being tracked by hunters who are convinced the animal is responsible for the gruesome death of a colleague. The bold and unconventional decision to give an animal a human voice is always a risky move, but in this instance it pays off big time. The cougar’s impassive account of his life in the wild, which covers the necessaries of survival and the strategies he employs to evade his pursuers and their dogs, injects the narrative with a degree of tension and suspense largely lacking in the others. Overall however the mood in these stories is contemplative, the prose filled with poetic touches. And though some of the very brief stories fail to leave a lasting impression, in The Green and Purple Skin of the World Paulo da Costa proves himself to be a skilled and daring practitioner of the art of short fiction.… (mais)