Literary Portugal also seems to allow itself to be soaked by that melancholy that assails the Lusitanian coasts to spread inland from the mistiest Atlantic. And the result is a hybrid between the magical and the existential. As brought from abyssal depths where everything has a place, from the sighting of fish never discovered to the sensation of reaching suffocating depths.
So we better understand Saramago o Person and thus we can also enjoy to a greater extent the prolific Antonio Lobo Antunes, psychiatrist for more details, with which we can deduce the unattainable ability to dissect the human psyche, with knowledge of the cause and documentation in this regard.
The result, around 30 novels and many more non-fiction works that include essays and compilations of articles, makes this Portuguese writer one of the most interesting storytellers in the south of the Pyrenees.
Top 3 recommended novels by Antonio Lobo Antunes
Elephant memory
The first time the great writer is discovered, the author who would spread all his creativity in thousands of subsequent pages. A novel that precisely shows off memory as the culprit of grief and melancholy.
The more years go by, the more our elephant memory gathers, more committed to debts than to the baggage of what we have experienced. The protagonist, a Lisbon-based psychiatrist whose true vocation is writing, tells, through an exuberant voice, facets and chapters of his life, emphasizing the most intimate and committed aspects.
Throughout a day and a night, the hero and narrator of this story shows the will to listen to himself, and in this way to find definitively a long lost identity.Elephant memory announces the arrival of an author who stands out for the originality in his way of telling, and what is even more remarkable: a writer who provokes in the reader an unusual way of reading.
Inquisitor's Manual
One of the good things about the Portuguese geography is its orientation almost completely given over to the ocean. And it has always been said that the great oceans have no memory. So Portugal, unlike Spain, has been able to forget its dictator Salazar as if it were something that his ashes had been swallowed by the immense sea.
So we start in this book from a specific dictatorship, that of Professor Salazar, everything else is a mere coincidence since the patterns in this manual extend to every place and occasion, through the remains of the memory of an unpayable crowd of characters -lovers, colleagues, corrupt businessmen, the doctor of the political police, disgruntled old military personnel-, who are related to a minister of the dictator, a masterful prose -and extraordinarily musical- that fills the reader with a deep indignation that will make them reflect on power, over state power, over states of power.
"I would like my books to recreate life as it is, to renew the art of the novel, to be mirrors in which our great miseries and our little greatness are reflected ..."
The natural order of things
Most likely, there isn't. The natural order of things, I mean. And the best way to assume it is to enter a novel like this made sum of subjective impressions to realize that the natural order is only an impression of our evolution as a species.
And all evolution has its crisis, from time to time, anywhere, when it is discovered that there is no reason to agree. Not even in essences like love or death. Because you were not so close to one when you blindly trusted him, nor so far from the other when time passes without their news. Ten monologue voices from loneliness and pain, from despair and fear, from illness and madness. Ten people faced with death.
Because this novel is about death that overwhelms from the first page, with a language that its author turns into a scalpel with which he enters the human soul to limits that are difficult to imagine, mixing times, interspersing the history of his country with those of his characters, in a whirlwind of memories and fantasies that take shape in a beautiful prose, meticulous and slow at times, vertiginous and sarcastic at others, carefully articulated to achieve a balance between formal rupture and apparent confusion.
Other recommended books by Antonio Lobo Antunes
Until the stones become lighter than water
The inexplicable matters of existence point to metaphysics or science fiction. Spaces of the imagination dancing with intelligence in search of inaccessible answers. This time to the rhythm of that fado that throws its questions to the past in search of horizons for the future. And no, in the end there is no science fiction as long as the most unlikely answers soak us with the aroma of Atlantic mist and what remains is a precious glimpse of the most mundane glimpses.
Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water is a dizzying, violent and, at times, hard book. Master of introspective prose, António Lobo Antunes weaves in this choral novel a tapestry in which emotions flow in a hypnotic dance, between past and present.
On the cobblestone streets of Lisbon, the voices of multiple generations resonate in a heartbreaking symphony. Through the eyes and hearts of unforgettable characters, Lobo Antunes guides us through the lives of a family marked by violence and secrets, forbidden loves and unspeakable desires.
Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water is a novel that challenges literary conventions, and invites the reader to explore the nature of identity, loss, and personal relationships. Lobo Antunes builds another masterpiece that flows like a melancholic river, dragging us in its current while immersing us in a reading experience that will last long after we have turned the last page. A novel, in short, where words become a mirror of the souls, capturing the very essence of the human being.
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