Antonio Lobo Antunes - Novels (6 books)

ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES (b. 1942) is a Portuguese novelist and medical doctor. He has been called "a novelist of the very first rank . . . an heir to Conrad and Faulkner" (George Steiner). His style is dense and sometimes disorienting, with multiple narrative voices jostling for space on the page. The novels are not easy to read but neither are they forbiddingly inaccessible, and few novelists have produced writing that is at once so gorgeous and so angry. According to the Paris Review, his work offers "kaleidoscopic visions of a modern Portugal scarred by its Fascist past and its bloody colonial wars in Africa."

THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD (1979) recounts the anguished tale of a medic haunted by memories of war and reflects the personal experience of Lobo Antunes as an army doctor sent to Angola during the Portuguese Colonial War. RETURN OF THE CARAVELS (1988) is another powerful indictment of Portuguese colonialism, set in Lisbon as Portugal's African colonies gain their independence in the mid-1970s. Lobo Antunes imagines Vasco da Gama and other heroes of Portuguese explorations beached amid the detritus of the empire's collapse.

THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS (1992) is a tale of two families and the secrets that bind them. The voices of Antunes' characters create a portrait of a disintegrating Portugal, a personal political history that attains the brilliance and surreality of Elias Canetti and Nikolai Gogol. Like a Portuguese version of "As I Lay Dying", but more ambitious, THE INQUISITOR'S MANUAL (1996) chronicles the decadence not just of a family but of an entire society morally and spiritually vitiated by four decades of totalitarian rule.

The multiple narrators in THE SPLENDOR OF PORTUGAL (1997) are members of a once well-to-do family whose plantation was lost in the Angolan civil war, and who speak in a nightmarish, remorseless gush to give us the details of their grotesque family life. The razor-thin line between reality and madness is transgressed in WHAT CAN I DO WHEN EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE? (2001), set in the steamy world of Lisbon's demimonde -- a nightclub milieu of scorching intensity and kaleidoscopic beauty, a baleful planet populated by drag queens, clowns, and drug addicts -- and narrated by Paolo, the son of Lisbon's most legendary transvestite, who searches for his own identity among the denizens of this hallucinatory world.


The following books are in PDF or ePUB format as indicated:

* Inquisitor's Manual, The (Grove, 2003). Translated by Richard Zenith. -- PDF

* Land at the End of the World, The (Norton, 2011). Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. -- PDF

* Natural Order of Things, The (Grove, 2000). Translated by Richard Zenith. -- PDF

* Return of the Caravels, The (Grove, 2002). Translated by Gregory Rabassa. -- PDF

* Splendor of Portugal, The (Dalkey Archive, 2011). Translated by Rhett McNeil. -- ePUB

* What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire? (Norton, 2008). Translated by Gregory Rabassa. -- ePUB

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