There are no words” is an expected—some might say appropriate—response to certain events. After a death, for instance, we often turn silent or speak unusually succinctly, as if something more might try and fail to assuage. When we do venture toward that “something,” the imposition of words on emotions tends to become elliptical, and fails to capture the sentiment underneath.

In Mozambique, or in any other nation where trauma has been sustained over many years, it seems natural that artistic representations might veer intentionally toward the elliptical or the surreal, forms that bend around words and ideas more than they pinpoint them. Factual accounting can also be a kind of reprisal—gun specs, war projections, survival statistics—but civil wars, colonialism, and exile refute static certainty in the same way people and families do. Well-construed surrealism not only masks the real but also enhances what is most difficult to explain.

Fittingly, then, proper nouns for the places and characters in Mia Couto’s The Tuner of Silences change, or are never given in the first place. Couto’s landscape alludes to personal, geographic, and political realities—but the river sounds more alive than the people do, and bullets move in and out of skin. Facts themselves are mutable, Couto suggests, when events change so dynamically. It is neither the country nor its characters that requires exact representation; it is the emotions and thoughts of those characters.

In the novel, a family hides in Jezoosalem, a Mozambican game reserve named by the dictatorial paterfamilias, Silvestre. Jezoosalem is a kind of reverse Eden, a new space at the end of time: instead of a heavenly, untainted place before the advent of sin, it is a region in which to hide, to seek cleansing. Instead of innocence, it is information itself that we glimpse but never capture—tantalizing facts surrounding the history and reality of these characters and the places they came from.

Silvestre remakes the past into an abstraction for his young boys, Ntunzi and Mwanito:

— The world: do you want to know what it’s like? …

He began to sigh, and I began to sigh. Words had returned to him after all, and the light he cast brought me back once more to the firm ground of certainty.

— Well it’s all perfectly simple, children: the world has died, and all that’s left is Jezoosalem.

Later, a Portuguese woman named Marta arrives, seeking reprieve from the...