António Lobo Antunes: The Fat Man and Infinity: And Other Writings

Babara Fisher reviews António Lobo Antunes' The Fat Man and Infinity: And Other Writings

António Lobo Antunes, one of Portugal's most esteemed novelists, for many years published short pieces of memoir, reflection, and fiction in weekly or biweekly columns in Portuguese newspapers. Collected here are a selection of autobiographical pieces that focus on his pampered childhood and fictions that focus on a variety of dismal or damaged lives.

The autobiographical pieces are both sweetly nostalgic and slyly self-mocking. Antunes recognized his calling to be a writer at an early age, sacrificing his career as an ice-hockey player and abandoning his dream to become Spider-Man to fulfill his artistic destiny. One piece, titled "Old Age," concludes, "I'm not an elderly man with the heart of a child. I'm a child whose envelope has grown slightly worn."

Read More

António Lobo Antunes: The Fat Man and Infinity and Other Writings

Dwight Garner reviews António Lobo Antunes' The Fat Man and Infinity and Other Writings.

Writing last year in The Nation, Natasha Wimmer, the gifted young translator of Roberto Bolaño's major novels into English, described the rivalry between the Portuguese novelists José Saramago and António Lobo Antunes. When Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, Ms. Wimmer wrote, "there were those who believed that the wrong writer had been chosen."

One of those people may have been Mr. Antunes. In 1998, when a reporter for The New York Times called him for a comment about Saramago's Nobel, Mr. Antunes said, "This phone doesn't work!" and cut the connection.

Mr. Saramago, born in 1922, and Mr. Antunes, born in 1942, are not easily confused on the page. Mr. Saramago's style is spare and allegorical. His best novels, like "Blindness" (1998), build like ticking cerebral thrillers. Mr. Antunes's work, on the other hand, is chaotic and jagged, in a style that can be reminiscent of Faulkner's.

Read More

António Lobo Antunes

Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes announced in an interview that in two years he will stop writing.
After his new book "Que Cavalos São Aqueles Que Fazem Sombra no Mar?" to be released this year and another one, Lobo Antunes intends to put an end to his career.

António Lobo Antunes: What can I do when everything's on fire?

Jaime Manrique reviews António Lobo Antunes' What can I do when everything's on fire?

From the beginning of his long, distinguished career, António Lobo Antunes has been a pitiless chronicler of Portugal's colonialism in Brazil and in Africa, the repercussions of which are felt to this day. Lobo Antunes served as a military doctor in the Angolan war of independence from Portugal (1961-75), which generated genocidal acts on both sides, and has emerged as the unquestionable historical conscience of the liberation wars fought by the Portuguese colonies in the 1960s. Haunted by Portugal's imperialist past and decades of repression at home, Lobo Antunes's characters are a cast of disaffected, predominantly marginal people whose souls have been corroded by the legacy of their nation's brutal history (another one of his major subjects is the 36-year right-wing dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, which ended in 1968). His latest novel, "What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?," translated into English with a pitch-perfect ear for colloquial speech by the legendary Gregory Rabassa, is another dissection of Portugal's sick soul.

Read More




Please visit SPLALit aStore
Portuguese Literature

Antonio Lobo Antunes: Knowledge of Hell

Benjamin Lytal reviews António Lobo Antunes' Knowledge of Hell.

We talk about psychological novels without expecting their authors to have any particular expertise in psychology. Novelists go on instinct, we understand. Henry James described a "sublime confidence" that allowed him to write about the inner lives of others, and we ask no more — and often less — of contemporary authors.

What, then, to make of a psychological novel written by a practicing psychiatrist? António Lobo Antunes, who has been in residence at Lisbon's Hospital Miguel Bombarda since the 1970s, is no mere dilettante: Until 1998, when José Saramago collected what will probably be Portugal's only Nobel Prize in literature for a generation, Mr. Antunes was widely considered a favorite for that prize. The author of some 20 novels, eight of which have now been translated into English, Mr. Antunes differs sharply in style from Mr. Saramago. Where the Nobel Prize winner writes universal allegories in polished, sometimes pale, prose, Mr. Antunes prefers a dense, distinctly Portuguese style, full of mnemonic crosscuts and unstinting imagery.

His attitude toward Portugal is one of wry disgust — he devoted one novel, "The Return of the Caravels" (1988), to the notion that the national heroes from the days of Prince Henry the Navigator might someday return, only to find a squalid harbor town, rather than the great nation they thought they had founded. In Portuguese literature, this attitude — not of keen regret, but of weary self-loathing — is at least as old as Eça de Queiros, the great 19th-century novelist. To this tradition, Mr. Antunes adds his own wretched experience as a medic in Angola during the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–74).

The belatedly translated "Knowledge of Hell" (Dalkey Archive Press, 312 pages, $13.95), from 1983, in many ways an autobiographical novel, draws heavily on Mr. Antunes's memories of Angola — but the titular inferno lies elsewhere. "In 1973, I had come back from the war and knew about injuries, about the cries of pain on the trail, about explosions [. . .] knew about spilled blood and longing, but I had been spared the knowledge of Hell."

Read More





Please visit SPLALit aStore
Portuguese Literature

Antonio Lobo Antunes: Knowledge of Hell

Andrew Ervin reviews António Lobo Antunes' Knowledge of Hell.

Readers of the newly translated Portuguese novel Knowledge of Hell will not be surprised to learn that its author, António Lobo Antunes, is also a practicing psychiatrist. It's difficult to name another artist who better understands the subtle ways in which memory constantly affects our conscious, in-the-present thought processes. W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust are obvious choices, but not entirely accurate ones. At his best, Antunes can make even those madeleine-induced, temporal cross-fades of In Search of Lost Time look like choppy edits in a bad home movie. If we're to look for influences on Antunes' lush, dreamy novel, admirers of Dante's epic will want to note that the Portuguese title Conhecimento do inferno could have been literally translated as Understanding the Inferno.

Knowledge of Hell follows an aging psychiatrist named -- go figure -- António Lobo Antunes as he drives home to Lisbon after a vacation in southern Portugal. During the journey, his thoughts glide back and forth between the present narration (in which he dreads going back to work) and memories of his youth (including his participation in Portugal's war with Angola). The tension of the novel grows quietly in the space between then and now.

Read More





Please visit SPLALit aStore
Portuguese Literature

Book Review: The Natural Order of Things by Antonio Lobo Antunes

In the early part of the century, authors like Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and James Joyce cobbled together difficult masterpieces out of shifting narrators and changing time sequences. After World War II, this method fell out of favor, but a Portuguese novel recently translated into English pays homage to the technique--and throws in a dose of magical realism for good measure.

In The Natural Order of Things, Antonio Lobo Antunes traces the complex multigenerational fortunes of two families that are haunted by their pasts. The book opens with the rambling nighttime reminiscences of a middle-aged man as he lies in bed next to a much younger, diabetic woman. It's clear that this is no easy relationship. As the man pathetically puts it, "Whenever I talk about myself, you shrug your shoulders, twist your mouth and stretch your eyelids in disdain and mocking wrinkles appear behind your blond bangs, so that I finally shut up."

In the ensuing chapters, the narration is taken over in alternating segments by a bitter, elderly man and an army officer who is arrested and tortured. And that's just in part one. Future chapters introduce us to a feisty prostitute and her pimp, and an illegitimate girl who is locked up by her father. The author doesn't exactly make all this narrative juggling easy to keep track of. When the speaker jumps, abruptly, in midparagraph, time shifts too, taking a reader across several decades and from modern-day Lisbon to Africa. (The relative obscurity of Portuguese history serves as an additional obstacle.) Only in the final 50 pages or so--or more likely, on a second read--will the careful reader be able to cobble together the pieces of this genealogical puzzle and construct the web that ties all these main characters together.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Portuguese Literature

The Natural Order of Things by Antonio Lobo Antunes

The natural choice after reading José Saramago is to read António Lobo Antunes, another leading Portuguese writer with several novels already available in English translations. Reading these two novelists, as well as João de Melo, gives the impression that there is some very exciting fiction coming out of Portugal. The Natural Order of Things is a novel in which the very theme is the coexistence, or simultaneity, of the past and the present, and of the real and the unreal. Antunes’s technical skill in getting this across is alone worth looking at. Among other stylistic feats, he writes amazing sentences in which two scenes, years apart in time, take place at once. He is compared to Nabokov, among others, for the time shifts, the song-like riffs and the very particular repetitions which are also reminiscent of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

Read More

Please visit SPLALit aStore
Portuguese Literature

The Inquisitors' Manual by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Review of António Lobo Antunes' The Inquisitors' Manual

Antunes's career began in the mid-1970's, as Portugal was throwing off Europe's longest-lived dictatorship, and that era of António Salazar still haunts his imagination. It haunts the country, too, this novel (translated by Richard Zenith) insists. "The Inquisitors' Manual" is not so much an allegory of fascism as an anatomy of the way it penetrates societies - families, psyches, bodies - and of the scars it leaves. The regime is represented by the man nearly everyone refers to simply as "the Minister." Minister of what we never learn, though Salazar himself pays deferential visits to the farm that this crude, swaggering patriarch presides over like a feudal lord - and penetrate is exactly what the Minister does: the cook (on the altar in the family chapel), the steward's teenage daughter (in the barn), the pharmacist's widow, the sergeant's wife, not to mention assorted maids and Gypsies. He's not even above ogling his prospective daughter-in-law with the same proprietary leer he directs at his dependents. No wonder his son has turned out to be such a frightened little mama's boy. As the Minister obligingly explains to him while bending the steward's daughter over the manger, "I do everything a woman wants except take my hat off, so that she won't forget who's boss."

Arrogance, brutality, moral squalor - much here is reminiscent of another anatomist of tyranny's intimacies, William Faulkner. And with the Minister and Salazar and their regime growing increasingly senescent, we breathe a rank atmosphere of illusion and cowardice, futility and neglect, that similarly recalls Faulkner's world. The farm chokes on its own abundance, run riot with vegetation and maddened by the cackling of birds. The windmill rusts, the garden angels crumble, the German shepherds sicken and die. Humans descend to the level of beasts; the boss who fornicates in the barn calls the vet to deliver his illegitimate child. The regime's collapse comes as only another in a long series of capitulations.

You can find the full review here

Buy The Inquisitors' Manual at Amazon.com