Bøger af Antonio Lobo Antunes

A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal's most celebrated writers

António Lobo Antunes's twenty-fifth novel, Commission of Tears (2011, Comissão das Lágrimas) is set during the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002). Angola attained official independence on November 11, 1975 and, while the stage was set for transition, a combination of ethnic tensions and international pressures rendered Angola's hard-won victory problematic. As with many post-colonial states, Angola was left with both economic and social difficulties which translated into a power struggle between the three predominant liberation movements. The People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), formed in December of 1956 as an offshoot of the Angolan Communist Party, had as its support base the Ambundu people and was largely supported by other African countries, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. In this novel, Lobo Antunes delves into this traumatic period of Angola's history through the fragmented memories and dreams of a broken woman. The author drew from the story of the commander of the female battalion MPLA (Popular movement for the liberation of Angola) who was tortured and killed following the state coup of May 1977. It is said that while they tortured her she did not stop singing. This is the story of Cristina, admitted in to a psychiatric clinic in Lisbon. In her torrent of memories, dialogues and traumatic episodes, Cristina remembers her early childhood in Africa, at the time when everything inside her head was intertwined with her father¿s voice, who was a former Black priest and became one of the torturers of the "Commission of Tears." Cristina's white mother, a cabaret dancer imported from Lisbon to entertain Portuguese farmers in Angola, marries the Black ex-priest because she finds herself pregnant with Cristina by her the man who exploits her, the cabaret manager. The long, twisting narrative weaves together the three voices of daughter, father, and mother as they recall the terrors of their life in Angola, and their own suffering. Their personal tragedies, scarred by racism and abuse, mirror those of the country that is being torn asunder around them.

El lenguaje sagaz y el manejo exquisito de la memoria de António Lobo Antunes nos sumergen dentro de los dilemas morales que la corrupción y el poder conllevan en la polifónica De la naturaleza de los dioses. Fátima, una modesta librera de Cascais, conoce una anciana a la que entrega libros en su mansión cerca del mar. Pero lo que la mujer busca no son lecturas, sino un interlocutor a su narración. Fátima se convierte, contra todo pronóstico, en su confidente. El discurso desesperado y urgente de la anciana, construido sobre palabras que reconoce huecas, dibuja el relato de la ascensión económica de su padre y de las consecuencias que su figura tuvo en todos los que vivieron su imperio y su poder. La misma mansión que acoge el eco de esos recuerdos fue el escenario fastuoso de la lenta ruina económica de la familia, una ruina que se conjuga con la que la vejez causa en el cuerpo y que empapa de melancolía y humanidad las distintas voces de esta novela. Lobo Antunes, uno de los más grandes narradores de la lengua portuguesa, indaga en el poder y en la pérdida de significado de palabras manidas por su uso: amor y pasión no significan amor y pasión. El lenguaje aparece roto, estropeado, y abandona a los personajes a una existencia afásica. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION António Lobo Antunes' shrewd language and exquisite handling of memory plunge us into the moral dilemmas that corruption and power entail in the polyphonic nature of the gods. Fatima, a modest Cascais bookseller, meets an old woman to whom she delivers books in her mansion by the sea. But, what the woman is looking for isn't reading material, but rather a conversation partner for her stories. Fatima turns into, against all odds, her confidant. The desperate and urgent speech of the old woman, built on words that she recognizes hollow, paints the picture of her father's economic ascension and the consequences that his figure had on everyone who lived through his rule and power. The same mansion that embraces the eco of these memories was the lavish scene of the family's slow economic ruin, a ruin that mixes with what old age does to the body and that soaks in melancholy and humanity the distinct voices in this novel. Lobo Antunes, one of the greatest narrators of the Portuguese language, investigates the power and loss of the meaning of words made trite with their use: love and passion don't mean love and passion. Language appears broken, ruined, and abandons the characters to an aphasic world.

An international best-seller and the novel that established Antunes's reputation in Europe, "The Inquisitors' Manual" is a rewarding and stunning piece of art that shows the damage tyranny does to each layer of society.

"One of these days I'll beach right here, devoured by fish like a dead whale," muses Rui S., portly thirty-three-year-old political historian and hero of the latest dazzling novel by Ant"nio Lobo Antunes. Little do we or Rui S. realize how prophetic his whiny lamentation proves to be until the close of this beautifully realized masterpiece of remembrance.Unable to accept the facts of his life"his mother's imminent death by cancer; his estrangement from his bourgeois family, especially his industrialist father; and his blunt rejection by his first wife and two children"Rui S. decides to change things.Now married to the nagging, dogmatic Communist Marilia, Rui S. puts together a weak-kneed agenda for change: he decides to skip yet another dull and pompous academic conference, escape to a resort town north of Lisbon, and there dump his homely wife. Marilia, however, beats him to the punch, announcing that she wants out of the marriage before he can summon the courage to speak. Returning again and again to the only memory he has of being loved"walking with his father as a young boy and listening to him explain the behavior of birds'Rui S. tries in vain to make sense of himself.In An Explanation of the Birds, Lobo Antunes has once again proved himself a master of the surreal, creating both a circus-like dream and a mournful eulogy for the lost ideals of post-revolutionary Lisbon.

From the author The New Yorker hails as one of the most skillful psychological portraitists writing anywhere.

Like his creator, the narrator of this novel is a psychiatrist who loathes psychiatry, a veteran of the despised 1970s colonial war waged by Portugal against Angola, a survivor of a failed marriage, and a man seeking meaning in an uncaring and venal society. The reader joins that narrator on a journey, both real and phantasmagorical, from his Algarve vacation back to Lisbon and the mental-hospital job he hates. In the course of one long day and evening, he carries on an imaginary conversation with his daughter Joanna, observes with surreal vision the bleak countryside of his nation, recalls the horrors of his involuntary role in the suppression of Angolan independence, and curses the charlatanism of contemporary psychiatric ¿advances¿ that destroy rather than heal.

Set in the aftermath of the ¿Carnation Revolution¿ of April 25, 1974, Antonio Lobo Antunes¿s Warning to the Crocodiles is a fragmented narrative of the violent tensions resulting from major political changes in Portugal. Told through the memories of four women who spend their days fashioning homemade explosives and participating in the kidnap and torture of communists, the novel details the clandestine activities of an extreme right-wing Salazarist faction resisting the country¿s new embrace of democracy.Warning to the Crocodiles (Exortação aos Crocodilos) has won:- Best Novel by the Portuguese Writers Association (Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela da Associação Portuguesa de Escritores) (1999)- The D. Dinis Prize of the Casa de Mateus Foundation (Prémio D. Dinis da Fundação Casa de Mateus) (1999)- The Austrian State Literature Prize (Prémio de Literatura Europeia do Estado Austríaco) (2000)

"Brilliant...harrowing...Packs the impact of an exploding mortar shell." -Kai Maristed, Los Angeles Times