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António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese novelist who died this week in Lisbon at 83, had little patience for discussing his craft. The mechanics of writing were, he liked to say, “such a bore!”. Yet few writers of his generation showed greater stylistic daring – when José Saramago was awarded the 1998 Nobel prize in Literature, many in Portugal felt the honour had gone to the wrong writer.
Over the course of more than 30 novels, Lobo Antunes honed an exacting modernist style all his own, using it to explore Portugal’s relationship with its fascist past, and to confront the tragic futility of its final colonial campaigns in Africa. Often dismissed as a difficult writer, Lobo Antunes crafted prose that was stubbornly flirtatious, at once inviting and resisting the reader. His sentences, lush with intricate metaphors and similes, bristly with ideas and provocations, brazenly flout the rules of grammar, syntax and punctuation, determined to preserve their idiosyncrasy. Texturally, his stories are a feat, combining discordant elements to exhilarating effects: nihilism paired with political gusto; farce shot through with horror; realism grading into the weird and the surreal.
Born in 1942 to a bourgeois family on the outskirts of Lisbon, in Benfica, Lobo Antunes was the oldest of six brothers. He wrote diligently from a young age but doubts set in after he began to be published in local magazines in his mid teens. “I began to nebulously understand that there was a difference between writing well and writing badly.” Later on, he’d cotton on to the fact “that there existed an even greater difference between writing well and creating a work of art”.
For Lobo Antunes, a true work of art possesses intensity. The novelist he saw himself as didn’t so much write as “engrave” words so “they could be read, like braille, without the help of one’s eyes. So that one could run one’s finger over the lines and feel the fire and the blood.”
Lobo Antunes is best known in the English-speaking world for his second novel, South of Nowhere (1979), the first of his works to appear in English, translated by Elizabeth Lowe in 1983; it was later retranslated by Margaret Jull Costa as The Land at the End of the World (2011). A tale reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but with a sturdier anti-colonial core, it centres on Lobo Antunes’ experience of being a military medic in Angola at the height of the war of independence.
Distilling his blood-soaked memories into a veteran’s intoxicated monologue, it is addressed ostensibly to a silent woman in a Lisbon bar, but really directed at a Portugal that has all but forgotten its crimes. The narrator passionately rails against this wilful amnesia, while also tracing the slow unravelling of his young marriage, his yearning for his family and the daughter born during his absence, and denouncing the “crazy ghostly” war fought against MPLA fighters, which exacted a terrible toll in lives on both sides.
Other novels that consolidated his position in contemporary Portuguese literature include The Return of the Caravels (1988, translated by Gregory Rabassa in 2003), Fado Alexandrino (1983, translated by Rabassa in 1990), The Inquisitors’ Manual (1996, translated by Richard Zenith in 2004) and The Splendour of Portugal (1997, translated by Rhett McNeil in 2011).
One of my favourites is Act of the Damned (1985, translated by Zenith in 1993). Set in the aftermath of the 1974 Carnation Revolution that saw the end of Salazar’s Estado Novo regime, the book inhabits the minds of a landed aristocratic family as they congregate at the deathbed of its patriarch in the medieval walled town of Monsaraz, keen on their inheritance. The old man’s affairs are managed by his monstrous son-in-law, who will go to extreme lengths to secure for himself what remains of a fortune largely lost to debt. Meanwhile, communists are baying for blood, and the family must flee. The novel features, in short order: incest, rape, canine slaughter and a character with Down’s syndrome who suffers some wrenching cruelties. The word I reached for on finishing the book was “diluvial”, as though I had been swept up in a torrent, engulfed by a sudden, unforgiving flood. It is a useful word to keep at hand when stepping into Lobo Antunes’s oeuvre: I offer it as a warning but, of course, mean it chiefly as praise. Lobo Antunes was a writer of uncommon courage and dazzling, showstopping finesse.
