Book review: Crow Blue, by Adriana Lisboa

Award-winning in her native Brazil, Adriana Lisboa now lives in Colorado, and Crow Blue – her first novel published in the UK, translated by Alison Entrekin – takes a similarly cross-continental journey. After 13-year-old Vanja’s mother dies, she moves from the “exaggerated tropicality” of Rio de Janeiro to Lakewood, Colorado: “flat, smooth, dry, tedious, dusty, uniform”. This is the home of Fernando – her legal father, who agreed to have his name on her birth certificate, but not her biological one. And it’s her true dad that Vanja is seeking.

Often, what we find on a journey is more interesting than the original object of the quest, and so it is for Vanja – and for the reader. Vanja discovers more about her new home, her new father-figure, and her mother’s past. Fernando also has a past and through his backstory, Lisboa gives us a potted history of the Araguaia guerrillas.

Fernando was a communist who believed the Brazilian dictatorship would be overthrown by an uprising of the people. Lisboa factually fleshes out these sections, drawing on actual events from the early Seventies; the Araguaia guerrillas rehearsed for armed revolution in the Amazonian jungle, before being hunted by the military. Many were tortured and killed, or “disappeared”, in a shameful chapter of history.

Although these sections are still “told” by Vanja the tone is often different – more informative, less impressionistic – compared with her more personal sketches of immigrant life in Colorado: struggling to read English literature, first glimpses of snow, a tender friendship with a Salvadorian nine-year-old named Carlos who lives next door. Yet even these have hindsight, told from a vantage point, nine years on. This allows Lisboa to write with a looking-back lyricism that befits a 22-year-old poetry-lover (the title comes from a Marianne Moore verse).

Lisboa has a nice habit of anthropomorphising abstract concepts or geographical features: “The ugly truths went to the restroom and touched up their makeup”.

The novel jumps between narratives and even within them, building up to big reveals or climaxes and then sliding away. These miniature cliff-hangers help hold the reader’s attention, for Crow Blue mostly has a meandering lack of urgency.

It’s not a flashy or deeply moving novel, but it does reveal how notions of home and of the self may be more defined by the people we travel with than where we end up.