When great writers die we go looking for them in their books. I have regularly sought the Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes since his recent passing. Death and Antunes – a dependable, even familiar pairing. Death haunts his five-decade oeuvre: the death of innocents, the death of tyrants (never soon enough), the death of culture, ambition, dreams. The death of one’s illusions, last of all. Such persistent mortal reckoning may suggest broadness of theme, but Antunes remained a writer of tenacious locality. His subject was always and only Portugal. The novels – more than thirty in total – were meditations on his country’s futility, its marginality, its appetite for appeasement, its desperate grasping. Great artists circle their themes and Antunes was no different: here was a clear-eyed poet of faltering empire.

I was first introduced to his work about a decade ago, when my friend Mauro tweeted the first page of The Inquisitors’ Manual (1996). In the gorgeous, recursive sentences, I experienced the mysterious jolt inspired by the genuine article:

And as I walked into the courtroom in Lisbon I thought about the farm. Not the farm as it is today, with the garden statues all smashed, the swimming pool without water, the kennels and the flower beds overrun by couch grass, the old manor house full of leaks in the roof, the rain falling on the piano with the autographed picture of the queen, on the chess table missing half the chessmen, on the torn-up carpet and on the aluminum cot that I set up in the kitchen, next to the stove, where I toss and turn all night, afflicted by the cackling of the crows…

I bought the novel and devoured it, followed closely by the other Grove Atlantic editions – An Explanation of the Birds (1981), Fado Alexandrino (1983), The Return of the Caravels (1988), The Natural Order of Things (1992) – with their wonderfully hideous covers. I told my friends about him, pushed him on family. (My wife, who is Portuguese, informed me I was pronouncing his name incorrectly.) He became a watchword for me. If you knew him, we were obscurely allied. Schoolboy stuff perhaps; but his conscience, his stylistic daring inspired loyalty and instinctive trust. The lyrical sensibility, the burning moral vision, the psychological delving, the black humour, the unwillingness to compromise or cut corners. I felt – and still feel – that he could do anything with the novel.

Antunes was trained as a medical doctor and psychiatrist, vocations whose difficult insights nourished his writing. In the early seventies he was sent to Angola as part of Portugal’s campaign to retain colonial power in Africa. He spent two desperate, futile years cutting open soldiers and pulling ‘living babies from half-dead mothers’, as he later wrote. (The quartermaster, sick from the sight of so much blood, instructed him – back turned – from a medical textbook.) His literary work can resemble something like vivisection, a peeling away of illusion revealing the hidden, trembling tissue beneath. The horrors of his time in Angola provided a prism through which to refract a pervasive sense of cultural decline. He returned to Portugal to practice psychiatry, dedicating his nights to writing. His first novel, Elephant’s Memory, was published in 1979; he continued to work as a psychiatrist until 1985.

The novels are mostly group affairs, with a series of narrators who orbit some lingering corruption or humiliating secret. They are dense and polyvocal, consciousness arrayed in all its fluidity and occlusion. Fado Alexandrino describes a reunion of four disillusioned veterans of the colonial wars; it is a fine grained portrait of revolution and disenchantment. The Inquisitors’ Manual, his masterpiece, details the senescence of a brutal minister during the Salazar years, whose estate is circled by a vulture-like retinue. The Return of the Caravels is a hallucinatory portrait of Vasco de Gama and other national heroes run aground in the post-imperial Lisbon of the mid-1970s. Each of these novels is peopled with impossibly real figures, grubby and frank and unpredictable. In their voices, we recognize our own private refrains, the whirling eddies of our consciousness. (A word of thanks here to his translators, particularly the peerless Gregory Rabassa.) To so readily divine the ambiguities of people (husbands and wives, soldiers, mystics, bureaucrats, neighbors, nursemaids), the ways their lives are riven through with debasement and exaltation, perversity, strangeness and pain – this is a Melvillean, a Gogolian, even a Shakespearean achievement; we might now add the adjective Antunesian.  

Memory is the active agent of his work, hardening and liquefying from sentence to sentence,  trapping the extraordinary image or unruly ghost, then dissolving into the myriad present. What is striking is that the formal features – staccato asides, italicized intrusions, parenthetical drifts – somehow concretize the act of recollection. His characters experience memory as an ever-present miasma, a vapour that seeps through the cracks of the present. Decades disappear with an indentation; entire lives fall away around punctuation – or, more often, its lack:

After five or six weeks

(or ten or twelve or twenty, who can tell me how long, Margarida?)

of urinating blood in the infirmary of the Fort of Caxias, my bladder full of crushed glass

(crushed glass, Mother)

they put me into a cell on the prison’s lower floor, where I tried to guess the time by the color of the sky, scarlet, blue, pale grey, white, or pitch black

(who could explain to me the colors, who will come to Tavira to explain the colors?)

I suspect Antunes’s legacy mattered to him. He came across as proud and a little pugnacious. (When his countryman Jose Saramago won the Nobel, a reporter called Antunes for comment; Atunes said his phone was out of order and promptly hung up.) Nobel aside, his stature is secure: a substantial and critically acclaimed corpus; an international readership; a clutch of awards. What remains is the exhilarating work. The indelible voices and granular details that give his Portugal an aspect of the eternal. Like so many of his characters, he remains animate in death, a granite eminence that turns its head, winks, scowls and returns to its frozen dignity.

Read on: Nick Burns, ‘The Politics of Fernando Pessoa’, NLR 129.