BAY OF TIGERS: An Odyssey Through War-Torn Angola

Four decades of civil war have left Angola a shattered country, an unpublicized catastrophe where land mines outnumber people and children play with surface-to-air missiles. Mendes went there in 1997, a Portuguese journalist investigating his nation's former colony. This extraordinary, difficult book is a record of the horrors he found: an infant without a face, a young beggar who resembles a "little five-year-old man," amputees lining up for electroshock therapy. The book's structure is as chaotic as the country. Mendes forgoes any kind of conventional approach, lurching backward and forward through time, switching points of view, quickly introducing then discarding characters. It would be frustrating if it weren't done with such evident purpose: the fractured, phantasmagoric depiction of a world gone mad. Mendes has a gift for wry observation (a colonel blissfully "sleeping the sleep of his rank") and surreal imagery ("a plush animal dangles crucified from the wire"), both of which well suit his subject. Equally valuable is Mendes's evident compassion for those he encounters. His description of a blind musician patching a guitar with chewing gum, for instance, tells much about the musician, but also reveals Mendes's superb observational skills. The book's principal drawback is that it doesn't supply the context of postcolonial African history. Those who don't have that—i.e., most people—will find the book tough going. (A glossary offers some help, but it's not enough.) Still, Mendes has crafted a unique, frightening book. Composed equally of journalism, oral history and even magic realism, it shows how people can endure and even prevail—despite their government's best efforts to keep them down. (May)