The Literary Mirror

Pinto's second novel follows Inês Fernandes, a cartographer commissioned to survey a village whose street names have shifted under Portuguese, then Indian, then municipal authority, each version erasing the one before it in the official record if not in local memory.

The novel is structured as a series of maps-in-progress, with each chapter correcting or contradicting the last, a device that occasionally overreaches but mostly earns its cleverness through sheer specificity — real-sounding lane names, real-sounding disputes over which name a grandmother still uses.

By the final chapter, Inês abandons the commission rather than finish it, on the grounds that a finished map would be a kind of lie. It's a satisfying refusal, and Pinto trusts the reader to find it satisfying without underlining it.

“Pinto's map is never finished, on the page or off it — and that unfinishedness is the whole argument.”