Book: Trust the Bluer Skies: Meditations on Fatherhood
by paulo da costa
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Michelle Shaw
Trust the Bluer Skies is a sensory-rich journey through a brief and distinct moment in time. Our daily lives so often pass in a blur, and we can reach the end of the day wondering what we actually did. In this book, paulo da costa slows us down and shares with us a leisurely, poignant kaleidoscope of memories and experiences as he details the six months his family spent in Portugal, his childhood home.
The author, his wife Heather, his four-year-old son Koah and his baby daughter Amari travelled from their home in Victoria, British Columbia to spend six months with his family in Vale de Cambra, Portugal where he grew up. While they were there, Paulo recorded his thoughts on “pastry receipts, train tickets and advertising flyers” to create a detailed account of their time.
The book is written in the second person in the form of letters to Khoa. paulo details the everyday events they experienced and intersperses them with recollections of his own childhood, family memories and musings on life. Yet the book is grounded in concrete details of a specific time and place. You can see the pigeon-filled skies and hear the bleating of Ti Fernanda’s goats in their pasture.
Trust the Bluer Skies reads easily as though it poured effortlessly from paulo’s memory. Yet the book has clearly been carefully curated over a number of years. Each distinct memory has been fine tuned and collected thematically. In the chapter bones for example, Paulo and his son see three older men “clutching black fedoras to their chests”, as they read notices framed in solid black borders posted on the coffee shop window detailing the names of the “freshly dead”. In the same chapter they also visit the graves of family members, and the chapter ends with news of the death of a loved one back in Canada, bringing grief into their present.
As an immigrant to Canada, many of paulo’s words resonated with me. He muses, for instance, about the “empty clan legacy” Koah experiences in Canada with no family nearby. And towards the end of the book when they are packing to leave Portugal and return to Canada he writes about how “the back and forth of the body requires elasticity of the heart”. I so clearly remember my seven-year-old daughter telling her grandmother in South Africa, as we were leaving to return to Canada: “But I won’t be able to hold you anymore!”
I’m not sure when the events in the book took place but the prologue was written in 2015 and I found myself constantly wondering what Khoa, who is now presumably a teenager, thinks as he reads his father’s words.
paulo da costa was born in Angola and raised in Portugal. He has won numerous awards including the 2020 and 2023 James H. Grey Awards for Short Nonfiction and the 2003 Commonwealth First Book Prize for the Canada-Caribbean Region. He currently lives with his family in the Rocky Mountains of Canada.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM