Tivolem.

Milkweed Editions, 1-May-98. First Edition, Ex-Library. Hardcover. Very Good. Mild shelf wear on dj, lightly aged pages, library stamps on edges & endpages. From Publishers Weekly: Despite its fascinating setting and artless charm, 72-year-old Victor Rangel-Ribeiro's first novel finally suffers from its clumsy prose, stilted dialogue and heavy sentimentality. In the early 1930s, Marie-Santana returns to her native village of Tivolem, in the Portuguese colony of Goa, after a 23-year absence. Orphaned, penniless and bearing the unhealed wounds of her past, Marie meets and falls in love with another recently returned prodigal, retired civil servant and amateur violinist Simon Fernandes. Their story threads together a maze of Goan vignettes and minor characters, many of them well drawn (a digression into the exploits of an unrepentant petty thief almost steals the show). Rangel-Ribeiro has a trove of stories (na?ve fairy tales at best, facile mysticism at worst), but these moments never quite justify the novel's conservative Catholic conclusion. Although historical events of 1933 filter into the novel's world via the radio of a nouveau-riche landowner, the village remains largely untouched by history. Readers ignorant of Goa and Portuguese colonialism in general would come away with the image of one big, mostly happy, multicultural family under the protection of the Catholic church. Author tour. (June) FYI: Tivolem won the 1998 Milkweed Prize for Fiction. The author is the former music director of the Beethoven Society of New York. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. The New York Times Book Review, Anderson Tepper: The novel ambles along at an unhurried pace, reveling in the small but resonant happenings of a faraway time and place.