Tivolem

Goa, on the western coast of India, is an isolated area settled by Portuguese fishermen. It is the blending of old-world Christian culture with traditional Indian society that makes life in Tivolem, a village in Goa, so unique.
Against this backdrop, Rangel-Ribeiro focuses on young Marie-Santana, who finds sanctuary in the quiet daily life of Tivolem after her family moved abroad many years earlier. Returning home from the heartbreak and betrayal inflicted by her former fiance, Marie-Santana finds Tivolem filled with eccentric personalities and a multitude of unexpected adventures. While caring for her elderly grandmother, Marie-Santana becomes attracted to her next-door neighbor, Simon Fernandes. But a past deceit involving Simon's far-flung brother and the censure of village gossips threaten the lovers and remind them that they - like the village - are inexorably tied to their pasts.

The New York Times Book Review
"The Indian journalist Victor Rangel-Ribiero has waited until his early 70's to offer his own slice of the fertile literary landscape of the subcontinent. His first novel, ''Tivolem,'' is set in 1933 in the Portuguese colony of Goa on the west coast of India. Here, in the tiny village that gives the book its title, his characters gather around the lone shortwave radio for news from Europe and even India, reminded by the sirens from distant ships ''of oceans ever to be crossed, of events beyond our control.'' While the outside world is full of drama, little seems to happen in Tivolem. So it's all the more exciting when a woman named Marie-Santana returns to the village after the death of her parents in Mozambique (and 23 years after she left as a young girl), trailed by a whiff of scandal and the ''very long shadow'' of a former fiance. Now the town gossips have something to occupy them -- and they have even more to talk about when Simon Fernandes, Marie-Santana's violin-playing neighbor (who has also recently returned from abroad), begins serenading her each night. Ultimately, Simon's link to the secrets of Marie-Santana's past helps teach her, as one of the characters puts it, that ''our lives themselves are like the crossings and recrossings of a river.'' Reflecting this wisdom, the novel ambles along at an unhurried pace, reveling in the small but resonant happenings of a faraway time and place." - Andrew Tepper, The New York Times

The Philadelphia Inquirer
"VictorRangel-Ribeiro... evokes vivid memories of 1930s Goa in his recent novel, Tivolem,winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize... Rangel-Ribeiro'sTivolem clearly captures one expatriate's lustrous memory of home with enormousverisimilitude.... In the increasingly chic territory of Indian fiction marked byArundhati Roy's poetic idiosyncrasy and Salman Rushdie's magicintellectual-ism, Rangel-Ribeiro anchors his debut novel in old-fashionedrealism... Tivolem gently evokes the well-made fiction of an earlier age." The Philadelphia Inquirer

The novel ambles along at an unhurried pace, reveling in the small but resonant happenings of a faraway time and place. -- The New York Times Book Review, Anderson Tepper