A novel about the horrors of war and its aftermath from one of Europe's most brilliant authors Award†'winning author António Lobo Antunes returns to the subject of the Portuguese colonial war in ...Angola with a vigorous account of atrocity and vengeance. Drawing on his own bitter experience as a soldier stationed for twenty†'seven months in Angola, Lobo Antunes tells the story of a young African boy who is brought to Portugal by one of the soldiers who destroyed the child's village, and of the boy's subsequent brutal murder of this adoptive father figure at a ritual pig killing. Deftly framing the events through an assembly of interwoven narratives and perspectives, this is one of Lobo Antunes's most captivating and experimental books. It is also a timely consideration of the lingering wounds that remain from the conflict between European expansionism and its colonized victims who were forced to accept the norms of a supposedly superior culture.
From "Fado Alexandrino" Antunes, António Lobo; Rabassa, Gregory
The Iowa review,
12/2001, Letnik:
31, Številka:
3
Journal Article
“What a shitty month of March,” the transport corporal muttered to his left, the knapsack on his back stuffed with African knickknacks that ragged one-armed blacks fob off on soldiers on leave in ...cafés in Lourenço Marques: tinfoil pipes, wire bracelets, horrible fetishes hastily carved with a jackknife in a miserable tin-roofed hut by some native. ...he thought I'm in Lisbon and in Mozambique, I can see the houses in the lower middle class neighborhood section and the trees in the jungle at the same time, the gouty little gardens and the straw huts devastated by machine-gun fire, the octopus with happy anxious arms calling us and the enormous, gigantic silence that follows ambushes, peopled with soft moans like the protests of the rain: he peeked under the Mercedes on the trail, and the guy sleeping in the cab a foot away from him was staring at him now with the distant distraction of corpses at wakes, their smiles softened into the amiable indifference of portraiture. Lisbon, he thought, disillusioned, twenty-eight months of dreaming about the stinking city and finally Lisbon is this, while a beer truck, growling on the gravel, came through the main gate past the sentry's toy musket, bits of Sandeman wine and Binaca toothpaste emerged from the rooftops, the officers were playing cards in the mess hut, waiting for their dinner soup. Completely motionless, his eyes closed, he felt his own blood pouring on the cushion, against his neck, just like a wounded animal running away, and around him the peaceful sound of the trees and the voices shouting at them from the other side of the grating in confused merriment: each leaf, he thought, is a trembling tongue, each eye a knot coming out of the wood, each body a branch bending down, startling and effusive.
The dialogue between António Lobo Antunes and Dinu Flămând (Cluj-Napoca, 7 October 2014) is multifaceted, addressing various themes: the function of literature, the autobiographical condition, and ...the carnival of writing and the playfulness of life. It is a literary dialogue in which the two partners complete and amicably tease one another on issues pertaining to literature, but in such a way as to propel ideas and speculations and memories that turn this dialogue into a prose of the autofiction type. It is just that, in this case, there are only two authors: a primary author (António Lobo Antunes, the guest) and a secondary author (Dinu Flămând, who has assumed the role of a catalyst for the memory of his Portuguese friend). The quotations and the evocation of other famous writers also turn this dialogue into a mini-essay, uttered in near musical cadences and featuring narrative and poematic inserts.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
My mother was their first cousin, meaning the first cousin of the father, not of the black son who was never his son though he treated him as a son and the black treated him as his father, the cousin ...of my mother brought him back from the war in Angola, five or six years old, I was still not born, I appeared afterward and remember my stepfather answering, when I asked him about his cousin’s reason for having returned with a child perhaps happier there in the backcountry where he found him, that almost all the soldiers came back
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