Top photo of the village of Marvao in Alentejo from īottom photo of the village of Monsaraj in Alentejo from The author, a native of Bangladesh, living in London, shows us personally as well as by her characters just how globalization is impacting even remote corners of the world. But the final chapter featuring a "feel-good" village festa can't erase all that comes before and seems a bit disingenuous. Ali gives us depressing but short, brilliant stories. One could argue that depressing small-town stories constitute their own genre: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson Village by Robert McAlmon Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, and Tales from the Mountain by Miguel Torga - also set in Portugal - all come to mind.
The Blue in the title, (from the blue in the Portuguese azulejos tiles) is a give-away - these are depressing stories filled with angst and anomie. The underlying theme seems to be you can run but you can't hide -from yourself - even in a small rural village in a foreign country. One émigré family from Britain that features a pot-head father, a lost, clueless son, a promiscuous mother and a promiscuous underage daughter, is so dysfunctional they could star in their own TV reality show. One of the other émigrés is an alcoholic author. But one local has returned from a decade as a cook and bartender in the Portuguese emigrant community in Provincetown, Massachusetts and he has no intention of ever leaving his Portuguese village again. One would think the locals couldn't wait to leave this abandoned corner of the earth, and some are trying to leave. Here in a tiny town in Portugal, the poorest province in the poorest nation in (Western) Europe, are assembled a cast of characters who are locals, tourists and émigrés, mainly from Britain.
This book is more a series of short stories with recurring and interconnected characters than it is a novel.
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