Reviews

A novel that explores the impact of unresolved issues related to loss, guilt, secrets and trauma.

When Silvestre’s wife dies, he takes his two sons and servant to a deserted game reserve - which he named Jezoosalem. With no outside interaction (with the exception of Uncle Approximado), his sons - especially Mwanito, whom Jezoosalem is all he knows - begin to question the stagnancy of their life in Jezoosalem.

This yearning for more is intensified when a Portuguese woman, Marta, comes to Jezoosalem. On her own path of loss, her presence opens old wounds and probes crucial dialogue.

Eventually they all move back to the city, where a lot of trauma and secrets are revealed.

I really loved this book - except for the inflammatory statements made about African/Black women by Marta - with the use of beautiful and descriptive language that makes the reader immersed into the book

littletaiko's review against another edition

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4.0

Sometimes a book has been on your shelf so long you no longer remember why you bought it to begin with. That is the case this time around. My best guess is that it was a tournament of book entry from a few years ago that for some reason caught my interest. A father has moved his two sons to a remote area along with their uncle and one other person and told his two boys that the rest of the world is dead. Each member of their group gets a chapter which helps unravel how they all ended up in this situation. This really isn't the sort of book that I usually like with people who are hard to relate to and don't make sense. Not to mention the rather odd relationship with a mule. Yet, the characters were eccentric and well-meaning enough that I just couldn't help enjoy reading about them.

ja3m3's review against another edition

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4.0

I wasn't sure what this book was about, but it was on the short list for the Tournament of Books, and coming in at around 224 pages I knew it would be a quick read. What I wasn't prepared for was how beautifully poetic and dream-like the writing was even when describing some pretty horrific events. There were lines in the story that made me pause and relish the beauty and sadness of the writing.

"You were once a good teller of stories, father. Now you are a story badly told."

[b:The Tuner of Silences|13592037|The Tuner of Silences|Mia Couto|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1342293737s/13592037.jpg|6773991] is the story of a father's madness and how he tries to shield his sons and escape from the brutal realities of the world only to find that the demons that you are hiding from are within.

The book does seem choppy in some places. There are some lost details regarding Marta that makes the story hard to believe. The transition to her story isn't fluid - she just appears. I do think that there is something lost in the translation. The original book is 294 pages, but the translated version is only 224 pages. Regardless of this problem, this has been one of my favorite reads for the TOB, and I am glad I was introduced to this writer.

meghan111's review against another edition

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3.0

3.5 I liked the poetic language and the dreamlike feel of this novel set in Mozambique and translated from Portuguese. It reminded me a lot of [b:My Abandonment|5603935|My Abandonment|Peter Rock|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348118650s/5603935.jpg|5775303] by Peter Rock, about a girl and her father living in Forest Park in Portland.

The Tuner of Silences is about a father who takes his sons to live in the middle of a national game reserve, where he tells them the rest of the world has died, they are the only people, and they are waiting for God to come and apologize to them. The first sentences of the book blew me away:

"I was eleven years old when I saw a woman for the first time, and I was seized by such sudden surprise that I burst into tears. I lived in a wasteland inhabited only by five men. My father had given the place a name. It was called, quite simply, Jezoosalem. It was the land where Jesus would uncrucify himself. And that was the end of the matter, full stop. My old man, Silvestre Vitalício, explained to us that the world had come to an end and we were the only survivors."

The images and words in this novel create a slow-paced story narrated by the eleven-year-old Mwanito. The story of a crazy tyrannical father whose strange rituals and fanatical beliefs shape his sons' lives and, in Mwanito's case, are all he knows of the world. Things are often inverted or reversed in the descriptions of this world. As his father lowers his older brother Ntunzi into a dry well, the rope in his hands is "the opposite of an umbilical cord."

The quasi-mystical language and weird lives depicted give mysterious weight to small things, like clothing thrown into and floating in a river, the moon. There was not much in this novel that evoked a particular setting for me - I could imagine the characters and story being taken out of the Mozambique setting and put into the desert of Utah, or perhaps set someplace nameless.

There were a few small things about the translation which bothered me: specifically, the overuse of 'my old man' for father and 'broad' for woman.