António Lobo Antunes (1942–2026)

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 show more 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 show less

Antunes (1942-) is a highly regarded Portuguese writer born to an upper-middle class family, who decided at a young age that he wanted to be a writer. His father, who was a neurologist, insisted that he attend medical school, so as to avoid a certain life of poverty as a writer. He was trained as a psychiatrist, then worked at an Angolan military hospital during the Portuguese Colonial War. He returned to Portugal in 1973, and wrote his first novel, Memória de Elefante (Elephant's Memory), show more in 1979.

The Fat Man and Infinity is a collection of Antunes' crónicas, short weekly or biweekly columns that he wrote for Portuguese magazines or newspapers. The writing is absolutely glorious, and the stories in the first two parts, which describe his early childhood and life as a writer, are frequently hilarious or touching, or both.

The last part of the book consists of fictional snapshots of working-class people in and around Lisbon. Many of these stories are almost unbearably sad; behind the veneer of ordinary lives lie stories of quiet desperation. People fall into and out of love; a man who sees a beautiful woman every day on the bus is tortured by his stuttering problem, and cannot bear to have the love of his life laugh at him; a woman in a restaurant begs her husband to not die there, but at home or in a hospital as decent man would. These latter crónicas were so intense and affecting that I had to stop reading them on several occasions.

This is an astonishing collection of stories, which have been, as usual, beautifully translated by Margaret Jull Costa. show less

Imagine, if you will, a darkly comedic melodrama set in Portugal at the start of Communist takeover. A decaying social situation and a decaying, formerly wealthy family, comprised of absurdly & horridly immoral and/or damaged individuals, who are awaiting the death of the patriarch so that they can flee to Spain, then to Brazil. The patriarch, the daughter with Downs Syndrome, the son (age 60ish) who believes he is master of a train station at the foot of his bed, the children of incest and show more so many more. I literally couldn't keep the characters straight until near end of the book. Quite confusing. The author described this book as "painful" to write, and on some levels it was painful to read. The incredibly vivid imagery and the fluidity of shifts from one narrator to another perpetuated a sense of chaos. Even the chapters were not numbered, just titled "Chapter ". Greed is the primary theme of this chaotic, intense, and also thought-provoking novel. Be wary before taking this one on! show less

Grandmaster of Metaphor

Trying to come up with the right word to describe Antunes' prose is difficult. Any comparisons are superficial, but I'll mention all the writers he resembles in minor ways. The best single word I could find was "tintinnabulation." That's what his words do. They rattle around in your head, slide around like unsecured luggage on a freighter, jostle and chortle, and crowd one another out, the images swarm, magnify and recede, searing your mind, and continually, and over show more and again, tintinnabulating until you're terrorized, barreling forward into Surreal, fractured heavens and hells.

At times I was lost, groping through the text, wall-eyed with indefinable sensations. The difficulty level bordered on Faulkner's Absolom, Absolom! at first, but I could feel the blockage loosening up. The dams eventually burst and the rollicking, hedonistic, rambling, phantasmagoric words flooded in with Biblical insistence. The author's intrinsic reliance on crunchy, noodling metaphors within metaphors sold me on the style, but it took practice to acclimatize myself to the hailstorm of his method. Having read The Land at the End of the World, I immediately bought all 13 volumes of Antunes currently available in English. Fado Alexandrino is a doubly forceful encore to that book, vaster and braver and more insane in every way. His prophetic images, nuanced through bodies and minds, his visionary texturing of layer upon layer of perspective, the imagination, the absurdist comedy, the deep pathos, the bloody violence, all congealed into a twisted nightmare. It took me far too long to read. At times I recoiled, gasping, but I always dove in for more.

The book takes place in a restaurant so splattered that the colors all run together. The men who tell their stories here are tied together by the tragedies of war and the semblance of lives they lead afterward, some politics intrude, reality blends seamlessly with their words - it is sometimes impossible to tell if a line is spoken aloud by a character or not, since quotation marks were missing from Antunes' typewriter. There is an astounding richness of diction, an abundance of syntax that is most inspiring, a Nabokovian variety of descriptions, endless clarifications, and haunting, Kafkaesaue flights of fancy all intricately interwoven with contra-textual interpolations, until it becomes a fabric of dispossessed, roiling, shamanistic visions, belligerent speculations, Borgesian depths of irony and allusion, an ever-deepening darkness, a whirlpool, spewed out by the most expressive, articulate of cynics, amid the most entertaining and gruesome business of warfare, as he warps mentally between Mozambique and Lisbon, cradled by his whores, the narrator, abysmally in his cups, indulges in luscious flashbacks, which layer the novel with a hazy filter.

It is a book to be treasured, devoured, regurgitated, and savored repeatedly. It is sustained dementia, a mesmerizing panoply of humanity's willy-nilly selfishness. It's mind-boggling to conceive how Antunes' brain concocted all of this controlled chaos. The riveting imagery makes for an immersive experience, as crowded as an Altman film, with "the strange toothache of nostalgia," fading in and out, coupled with effective motifs and repetitions, as the characters "vomit out the sea."
It is an interior sea, as detailed and manic as Javier Marias at his best. The sea of human emotion and strife, language as a liquid, solidifying around them. The narrative flows. The chapter divisions become almost meaningless, but stopping reading is like coming up for air before plunging back down into an ocean of grease. It meanders, digresses, diverges, submerges you. You have to succumb to the galloping rhythm if you are going to make it all the way through this monumental work.

Schizo-phrenetic, with constant interruptions, confusing jump cuts and scene changes, often mid-sentence - just roll with it. It's a sophisticated form of impressionistic storytelling. The environment is constantly personified, wilderness mingles with urban settings, nurses become creatures, and the wildest illusions intrude into the mundane conversations of night club drifters. Get used to the feel of mud, insects, rot, destruction, toads, make way for sex, murder, strangulation, erotic fixations, bursting pustules everywhere, simply everywhere, war-torn landscapes of the mind, stumbling, delirious soldiers, and obviously, death as a hovering omniscience. Antunes is as acerbic as Céline, but somehow dignified in his irreverence. His prose is always biting, pissing and scratching as it scrambles through labyrinthine paragraphs, you are grabbed, manhandled and left in a slowly drying pool of excrement. The book is truly fecal in texture, with elephantine horrors sliding across the page, dwelling too long under your nose, dribbling over your mind, leaving a definitive, tongue-shriveling aftertaste, at times deliciously repulsive. Reminiscences manifesting with lucid detail, scenes morphing into still-lives, memories metamorphosed into fossilized hangover hallucinations - these are the corridors of this literary convolution. Remarkably, it is crystalline in structure, and gem-like metaphors sprout in abundance: "The washing machine was sobbing away at its work." - Hundreds of profound observations about the state and nature of objects and environments parade through the narrative, every character is caught with their pants perpetually down, trailing afterbirths, or excrement, like baffled fish in the grit-smeared tank of Antunes' mind.

The squelching, magnificent simile-metaphor sandwiches are to be re-read endlessly, like the following - "Madam Simone, hand-in-hand with the fellow in a red jacket, came back on stage rolling her ancient body with all the grace of a locomotive, and bending over in an awkward bow that made the vast withered mass of her mammaries pop out like cartilagenous heads of twins peeping out and hanging down in the course of a birth."

How could you not read this? show less