MemoirBy any standards, Lisa St Aubin de Terán has led an astonishing life. Married at 18 and swept away to Venezuela by a much older and, as it turned out, deeply unstable husband, her life ever since has been one of exotic adventure, success, failure, romance and passion.
And yet, even for someone so richly experienced and enviably well travelled, there remains something faintly dubious about having penned no less than five autobiographical works before the age of 55.
This is not to cast doubt upon her gifts as a writer of memoir - setting aside her fiction which has also, rightly, been critically acclaimed - but even readers of her wonderful The Hacienda, which recounted those early years of running a plantation in the Andes, might wonder what more she can have to say about her life. Well, as it happens, rather a lot, because even for a woman as intrepid as St Aubin de Terán, her new incarnation is possibly her most extraordinary yet.
At the age of 50, in 2003, she went on a trip to Mozambique to research a possible documentary; it was a journey that changed her life. Overwhelmed by the place and its people, by 2005 she had packed up her previous existence in Amsterdam and moved there to set up a local college for tourism and agriculture with her new partner, Mees.
For St Aubin de Terán, this was not just the latest in a succession of daring ventures - it was nothing short of a spiritual homecoming. "I was always looking for something and I didn't know what that something was," she writes early on. "I just knew intuitively that I'd recognise it when I found it. Find it I did . . . on the northern coast of Mozambique."
She conjures up the hypnotic effect the place had on her in some of the book's most lyrical passages - deserted, crystal-water beaches, tropical mangroves, half-ruined colonial palaces are described lovingly - but she's equally concerned with communicating the shocking poverty in this forgotten corner of Africa.
It's a level of deprivation that's hard to comprehend - the village of 7,000 where she goes about setting up the college is largely inaccessible, has no electricity, no running water, no post office, no shops; there is no doctor for miles around, and its long-suffering people subsist on the day's catch and a few crops. St Aubin de Terán catalogues this lack of resources down to the last detail; as she says, "the problem of survival is so universal and paramount that little else can distract from it".
YET, FOR ALL the drudgery, there is a magic about the region that captivates her, and these pages are rich with tales of ancestral spirits, the local tradiçao (pagan beliefs) and rituals. In between describing these two sides of the same coin - and the many ironies they throw up - she tells the story of founding the college in a beautiful, derelict palace left over from centuries of Portuguese rule, and it's this daunting task, with its many frustrations, that drives the main narrative.
There are others though - Mozambique Mysteries is something of a hybrid. On the one hand, it is the author's account of the changes in her life, both spiritual and personal. In truth, and to her credit, St Aubin de Terán doesn't talk much about her relationship, and even then only in terms of how Mees inspired her. On to this personal story she grafts much of Mozambique's history; but most of all, it's a rallying cry to raise awareness for her project and carry on its fight against poverty in defiance of the odds.
These strands weave over and across each other, doubling back and jumping forward, and a more rigorous edit might have avoided the occasional repetitions. But then as St Aubin de Terán herself says, "My original plan for this book was to write a diary to describe my time in northern Mozambique in daily units . . . The result on the page is more random than I intended, but it keeps pace with the place". And if her mission to hammer home the sheer need of that place sometimes detracts from the grace of her prose (practicalities such as the repairing of old generators rarely make scintillating reading), it is always balanced by this: having been a person who used her life as the inspiration for her writing, she is now, through this book, using that writing to change lives in the most profound way. And who can argue with that?
Catherine Heaney is a contributing editor to The Gloss magazine
Mozambique Mysteries By Lisa St Aubin de Terán Virago, 370pp. £17.99