Reviews
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Obligatory reading for the North American Luso Diaspora – impressions by Diniz Borges
Diniz Borges on Beyond Bullfights & Ice Hockey (essays) Just began to read this new book of essays by paulo da costa. The first essay is amazing. Paulo is a great writer. The title of the book is great. Indeed, beyond some of these stereotypical cliches that we slap in the Portuguese experience in North-America. Paulo writes from a Portuguese-Canadian experience, not very different from ours here in the US. I will continue reading this great book of essays and it will be, I’m sure, one of future articles for the Portuguese language press in the US and in the Azores. Congrats to Boavista Press for the publication. Acabo de…
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The Cartography of Being – by Nuno Judice – Reviewed in The Malahat Review
Nuno Júdice, The Cartography of Being, translated by Paulo da Costa (Victoria: Livros Pé D’Orelha, 2012). Paperbound, 126 pp., $17.95. Poetry Review by David Swartz Nuno Júdice’s poetry is dense, rich, lyrical and, above all, philosophical. It expresses a philosophy that equates poetry with every aspect of life, and a portrait of the poet in the act of self-creation through the making of poetry. In The Cartography of Being, Paulo da Costa’s selection and translation of fifty-one of Júdice’s poems written between 1967 and 2005, presented side by side with the Portuguese, captures the flow, rhythm, cadence, and overall meaning of the poet’s original creations. Júdice is…
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Malahat Review – Seamless Stories Haunt
The January 2014 issue (#185) of the University of Victoria’s Malahat Review features a review of The Green and Purple Skin of the World. Fiction Review by Norma Lundberg The Green and Purple Skin of the World: Stories by paulo da costa (Freehand, 2013). Paperbound, 208 pp., $21.95 The sixteen stories in this collection proceed so seamlessly a reader might initially suspect them of being slight—a smooth skin of words, a faint echo from the title. But just as our skin is only the surface of our complex bodies, these stories are alive with characters in their own complicated worlds. They slowly enter the reader and haunt…
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The Green and Purple Skin of the World – The Quill & Quire Review
The May issue of Quill & Quire features a review of The Green and Purple Skin of the World. The world described in paulo da costa’s second book of short fiction is a sensual one. A poet and translator, da costa favours imagistic language to explore characters’ relationships to one another and to nature, depicting a scenic tapestry of interpersonal phenomena that spans love, war, aging, and death. The book’s 16 stories tend to be brief, but the longer and more complex pieces are the most satisfying. A prioritization of setting and atmosphere over plot is established in the first story, “Flies,” in which two older Portuguese men lament the…
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Sharp and True – a book review by the Coastal Spectator
Collection’s stories are sharp and true May 23, 2013 The Green and Purple Skin of the World By paulo da costa Freehand Books, 208 pages, $21.95 Reviewed by Yasuko Thanh Born in Angola, raised in Portugal, paulo da costa won the Commonwealth First Book Prize in 2003 for his collection The Scent of a Lie. In The Green and Purple Skin of the World, his first book of short fiction in 10 years, language and its power form a thread through many of the stories and words are highlighted in entertaining characters such as Dona Branca, who collects newspaper clippings of disasters and glues them in an old photo album.…
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Unhurried & Meditative – A National Post review
paulo da costa is concerned with the passage of time and its effects on generational attitudes and memories. Da costa’s writing is recondite, preferring a lyrical, almost poetic style of narration. The stories in The Green and Purple Skin of the World (Freehand Books, 206 pp; $21.95) have an unhurried, meditative aspect that suits the material, but can also be wearisome over the course of an entire collection. The Table is typical of many of the stories in the book. Not much happens on the level of plot; the author is more concerned with dissecting the relationship between a mother and her son, and using that relationship to examine the…
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Impressive Stories – Edmonton Journal
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Canlit fabulism – Globe and Mail
Saturday, December 28, 2002 The Scent of a Lie By Paulo Da Costa With this book of linked stories, paulo da costa adds piquant new spice to the CanLit broth. Despite a recent Booker short list proving yet again that Canada’s writers are also the world’s, we’ve still lacked (I invite correction) a fiction hailing from Portuguese villages. Paying homage to a fabulist tradition running from Marquez and Borges and Carlos Fuentes all the way back to Cervantes, Da Costa evokes his God-beset, earthbound peasants, priests and villagers with palpable, redolent precision. Meanwhile, his setting in time remains indeterminate, suggesting a range that stretches across centuries, yet points unerringly to…
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New World Odour
Calgary writer paulo da costa’s short story collection The Scent of a Lie is the most uniformly fresh, sprightly, meaty work of Canadian fiction I’ve read in a long time. It came as a shock to me that the book had difficulty getting published. Now accumulating the attention it deserves, Da Costa’s book won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean Region)—as did similarly groundbreaking works such as Icefields by Thomas Wharton and Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto—and just this week it was awarded the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize. The linked collection of stories centres on the inhabitants of two small communities…
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Tricked by the dusk – Toronto Star
From Cowtown to Portugal, with love Spare, poetic tales of ordinary people Once upon a time, not so very long ago, in a windblown modern city in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a young Angola-born man sat down to tell wonderful, enchanting stories set in lands far, far away. These are stories about people and lives far removed from our contemporary bustle, but the emotional and imaginative truths they portray resonate long after the pages have been turned. The Scent Of A Lie, a collection of 14 related short stories by Calgary writer and editor Paulo da Costa, marks the debut of a remarkable writer. Artists in any…
