Alentejo Blue

ALENTEJO BLUE follows Monica Ali's highly acclaimed novel BRICK LANE, which I picked up and read recently so I could compare these two works. In both novels she displays her knack for description and detail, and it's quite clear that she's a gifted writer. However, while BRICK LANE seems to have problems with structure and a meandering plot, it still shows off her talent for characterization. The structure of the current novel is much tighter but again showcases her gift for creating life-like characters in such great detail that it's easy for the reader to picture every nuance, every slight body movement of each character featured. While I warmed up to BRICK LANE right away, it took me longer to get into ALENTEJO BLUE. Each chapter reads almost like a separate short story, in which at first the reader will not see any connection among the chapters, except for the fact that they take place in the same tiny village of Mamarrosa in Portugal. Some of the individuals are visitors on vacation, and others are expatriates from Britain. For the most part, however, the villagers are people whose families have lived in this part of the country for generations. We get inside their heads, and Ali writes and creates her characters without holding back. There are plenty of expressive words scattered throughout, such as "farting" and "snots." What joins each chapter with the next is the mention of a man who is expected to return home after many years of traveling. Marco is the son they are all proud of, and they're waiting for his arrival as if in anticipation of royalty or a big time international celebrity. In the meantime, life goes on and we learn about the little details in the villagers' lives, including a family of British expatriates who are in Portugal because they're running away from their previous sordid lives. They live in poverty and are clearly quite dysfunctional. They inadvertently get involved with another Brit, a writer, who becomes involved sexually with the two women in the family (mother and daughter) and one can imagine how that ends up. Another interesting character details the story of a young woman who is about to make a choice: whether to stay with her man in Portugal or move away from the village to take a job as a nanny in England. And there's the shop owner who learns he's about to get competition from an Internet café; he spends his time seething about the indignity of it all, feeling that change is not always good. What I found interesting was the overlap in each chapter; as we get to know each character and slowly get the feel of the village, they surface in other chapters. By the end of the book, when Marco finally returns home, almost every villager will express their opinions (or lack thereof) of this big event, and the reader finally gets to meet this mysterious Marco who has been made into some sort of hero. While the story of Marco is a loose thread that weaves itself through each chapter, ending with a surprise homeco

Five Mesmerizing Stars!! Monica Ali's wonderfully conceived sophomore effort transcends the Bangladeshi roots of her debut novel "Brick Lane" by a considerable distance, physically and topically. She transports us to the village of Mamarrosa Portugal in the southeastern rural area of Alentejo and a tangle of lives and events played against the country's historical, social, and economic factors. In so doing, she elevates herself from a writer who can very convincingly write about her own background to someone who can conjure up a totally different stage, across a wide swath of time, and reveal the innermost workings of other cultures and characters. And in the "acknowledgements" she tells us she's spent time in rural Portugal and studied the language, and it clearly shows in her wonderful writing! Not 'chick lit', it's 'Wonderful Lit'! 'Saudade' (a Portuguese word which appromixates 'sadness/hopeful longing') hangs in the air, hence the "Blue" for atmosphere (and a local paint color), but it's not a turn off. It's exactly like taking a short vacation in a rural town in a foreign land, full of quaint, interesting, interlaced characters that you take as they come, soak up some history and the local sights, and then you go home, better off for the experience! There are no murders, spies, or insidious terrorist plots. Roughly-hewn, beautifully complex characters abound. And her prose can be spellbinding, whether she's writing about dictatorships, the vagaries of love, or an almond tart. A few crude situations are present. I like the way she drops us into a scene and slowly makes us aware of where we are and what's going on. The verbiage of some of the Portuguese characters is somewhat obtuse at times, almost like a translation, but certainly not difficult to follow and it does transmit a certain cultural mindset, which is significantly different from the foreign characters in the novel. Shifting timeframes (67 years) and situations within her first vignette on Joao and Rui, the reader is introduced to the hardships and complexities of a friendship that begins during the Salazar dictatorship and actually ends at the beginning of the vignette. Then she makes an even bigger temporal and topical shift to current day Portugal and the complex story lines of the ex-patriots and tourists, and the differences within their worlds around the village of Mamarrosa. And then there are the local citizens with their fascinating stories, some staying, some escaping and some unable to: the scene between Joao and Teresa, juxtaposing the old and the new, the settled and the unsettled is flat out beautiful writing. It's an example of islands of especially lyrical prose that pop up everywhere in this novel. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is no resolution coming in a chapter, just the exhilaration of the wonderful prose and great descriptions of the villages and countryside and it's inhabitants, but that is not always so. But it doesn't matter if there is a de