Scent of a Lie
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At Home in Two Cultures
A citizen of the world examines his multicultural identity paulo da costa, in conversation with Fernanda Viveiros In the words of Saint Augustine, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” It could be said that writer paulo da costa has read many pages since immigrating to Canada in the late 1980s. Born in Luanda, Angola, and raised in Portugal, paulo has traveled throughout Europe and Brazil, lived in Calgary and on Cortes Island, and recently touched down in Silverton, a tiny hamlet in the Kootenay mountains. Now settled in Victoria, he is preparing to leave for a month-long stay in Portugal where…
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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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Enclosures
New essay in Queen’s Quarterly
Beneath Thin Skin – BC Bookworld feature
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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…
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Palms
Tomás leaned against the muddy wall of the trench furiously whittling a knotted tree branch. He paused, controlled his impatience, not wishing to carve the wrong groove. The knuckles of his hand were white, his fingers numb from the relentless work, the iced air. He unwrapped his frozen fingers from the wood and warmed his hands under his armpits before firing random shots into the night. He waited for the enemy sentinel to dutifully respond. The shots echoed over the hill. Tomás sighed. One more hour of silence would now settle over the trenches. Tomás sealed a rolled cigarette with his tongue and lit the smoke under his coat. As…
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Da Costa bears criticism
Calgary Herald Tuesday, May 06, 2003 Paulo da Costa chose Canada as his place of residence despite an encounter with a grizzly bear. Paulo da Costa will read from The Scent of a Lie at noon today at McNally Robinson Booksellers as part of the Commonwealth Writers Prize celebrations. Calgary author Paulo da Costa knows a thing or two about standing his ground — in the face of both critics and carnivores. His face-to-face with the carnivore came a dozen years ago on a hike in the Alberta Rockies. The Angola-born, Portugal-raised writer hit the trail alone for a bit of soul-searching as he struggled to decide whether to…
