António Lobo Antunes

Jackson Pollock once said, 'Every good artist paints what he is', which is something I was reminded of and felt was particularly pertinent to 'The Land at the End of the World' by Antonio Lobo Antunes. Antunes trained as a psychiatrist but, through national service, spent 27 months as an army medic during Portugal's doomed colonial war in Angola. His alienating experiences in the African country serve as the subject matter for this strongly autobiographical novel. So too, his childhood memories of family pressures surrounding his conscription and the later opposition to the government who sent him there. The protagonist, an army doctor sent to Angola, lives the life of Antunes, expatiating his experiences to his reader in an amalgam of digression and visceral diatribe.

Antunes is a god of simile and metaphor. At first, they were all I noticed and I perhaps felt there to be too many, but as the novel progressed, they were the engine to his evocative and macabre prose, filling my mind with powerful imagery as I vicariously experienced the grim and futile labours in ‘the armpit of the world’. In conjunction with this, a mention must go to the translator Margaret Jill Costa (who I understand has won many awards) who has done a magnificent job in translating his exemplary prose. Earlier this year, I waxed lyrical about the writing of David Foster-Wallace, believing that he was a class part in his manipulation of language, but I have seen in only a few months that other writers with equal genius exist, Antunes being the first I’ve to encounter since making the bold claim.

An example:

Gradually, the wear and tear of war, the never-changing landscape of sand and sparse woods, the long, sad months of mist that turned the sky and the night the sepia brown of faded daguerreotypes, had transformed us into a species of apathetic insect, machines made to withstand a day-to-day existence filled with hopeless hope, afternoons spent sitting on barrel-stave chairs or on the steps of the former administration post, staring at the excessively lethargic calendars on which the months lingered with maddening slowness, while endless leap days, full of hours, swelled up around us like great bloated, putrefying bellies that kept us imprisoned with no hope of salvation. We were fish, you see, in aquariums of cloth and metal, dumb fish, simultaneously fierce and tame, trained to die without protest, to lie down without protest in those army coffins, where we would be welded in, covered with the national flag, and sent back to Europe in the hold of a ship, our dog tags over our mouths to quash even the desire to utter a rebellious scream.

I look forward to the many other offerings from this writer, a genius who may be lost in Saramago's shadow yet who very much deserves to share the light. 5/5… (més)

"but I had been spared the knowledge of Hell." — Antunes

The compulsive metaphor is the usual mark of inferior writing, but Antunes is doing something different here. Using the metaphor as a kind of Spacing between phrases, as something not meant to be read - a temporal distancing. The use of ellipsis (as in Celine/Tolstoy) would be more direct, though in such cases the reader simply passes over the impediment. Were Antunes to advance further on this theme/style, perhaps he would find himself the Oulipian successor of the micro-catalog (short list).… (més)

A partir de la figura de un ministro del dictador portugués Salazar, el escritor Lobo Antunes recorre minuciosamente los síntomas de disgregación de una época histórica a través de un desfile de múltiples personajes que hablan, se desdicen y se empeñan en dar vanamente a sus vidas un sitio y un sentido en un mundo que se derrumba. En una sociedad que es más circo que teatro, lo ridículo y lo trágico se reúnen para ser analizados por una mirada irónica que caricaturiza acciones y comportamientos a la vez que aprovecha para denunciar las formas inquisitoriales del poder. Con su prosa deslumbrante, Lobo Antunes despierta en los lectores la necesidad de crítica, de lucidez, de convertirse ellos mismos en inquisidores que indagan qué hay detrás de las máscaras que realmente ocultan los diversos nombres de la vida. El éxito de Manual de inquisidores en Alemania, Francia, italia, Países Bajos, gran Bretaña o Estados Unidos ha consagrado definitivamente a António Lobo Antunes como uno de los escritores portugueses mejor considerados en el ámbito literario internacional.… (més)