 Don't Miss
More at Powell's
Original Essays | June 27, 2009
By Fran Cannon Slayton
"Unfortunately, I've been to my fair share of wakes."
Continue »
-
 |
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Available for In-store Pickup
in 7 to 12 days
Knowledge of Hell (Portuguese Literature)
by Antonio Lobo Antunes
|
|
|
|
Synopses & Reviews Review: "The narrator of this stark and elegantly translated novel is a psychiatrist named Antnio Lobo Antunes, returning from vacation to his loathed job at Miguel Bombarda Hospital in Lisbon. Over the course of the trip, the narrator's mind ranges over the monstrosities he encountered in the colonial wars in Angola in the 1970s and in his work; through the layering of memories, he draws parallels between the destruction of the war and the questionable care offered to the mentally ill. The novel is both stylistically and emotionally demanding: the point of view shifts back and forth from first- to third-person as the narrative develops in a plotless associative collage, including a hallucinatory episode in which hospital employees gleefully consume the corpse of a soldier. The novel has a heavy autobiographical element and presents a bleak vision of humanity, except in the narrator's tender appeals to Joanna, his daughter, to whom much of the novel is addressed. In this early work (first published in Portugal in 1983), Antunes transforms rage into gorgeous, lyrical language." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "As I may have written in these pages before, my mom would pester me from time to time about killing herself: 'Tell me why I shouldn't just jump out this window and end it once and for all?' The window in question was only on the second story; it was a picture window, she would have had to muster up tremendous velocity to crack the thing, and if she'd succeeded, she would have ended up down on the ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) patio with a couple of sprained ankles and not much else. I'd point this out to her, and she'd reply, 'Tell me why I shouldn't just jump out this window and end it once and for all?' I'd answer weakly that although life might seem intolerable at this particular moment, actually there were some fairly interesting things to be found in it — friends, food, travel. She'd fix me with glittering eyes and respond, 'Tell me why I shouldn't just jump out this window and end it once and for all?' And I'd say that if I had a dollar for every time she'd asked me that question, I could put my children and my children's children through Harvard and have money left over for lunch. To which she would reply, 'Tell me why ... ' Which is why, on Page 239 of 'Knowledge of Hell,' when a second lieutenant in an African war posed the question, 'Why do people kill themselves?' and this question was repeated again on Pages 240, 242, 246, 251 and 256, I had, as they say, a definite experience of deja vu. It's not that my mother ever got around to killing herself; she lived to be 89. And the author, Antonio Lobo Antunes, is in his 60s and still going strong. What they share is a robust contempt for all things alive: To exist is to be trapped into something like a vast Wal-Mart universe of cheesy, tainted, phony goods and thoughts — all, all of it, good for nothing. The glamour, the glitter, the authenticity, lies in death. And, in a sense, there's no arguing with that. Man is born to die; our swaddling clothes will become our shrouds, soon enough. Still, is it such a breach of moral integrity to sneak in a little fun or joy or distraction during that cosmic blink when we are alive? Antunes would perish at the very thought. The protagonist of this novel, who bears the same first name as the author, can be said to be in an ongoing, very persistent bad mood. He works as a psychiatrist in an insane asylum in Lisbon, as does the author, and hates his profession. When the novel opens, he's driving home from a coastal vacation. The place may look nice to some people, but he's not buying it: 'The sea of the Algarve is made of cardboard like theater scenery,' he observes, and during his long drive home his outlook doesn't improve. He ponders the job he's returning to, likening it to being 'in Auschwitz in an SS uniform, listening to the welcoming speech of the camp commander while the Jews mill about on the other side of the wire tripping over utmost misery and utmost hunger. ... I belong to the superior race of the jailers, the castrators, the police, the school principals, and the stepmothers of fairy tales.' He doesn't like his job, and he doesn't like the bourgeois life that goes with it: the heavy meals, the walks in the town square, the authoritarian wife who 'will devour me, in bed, with the gigantic mandibles of her vagina, forcing me to sweat over her gelatinous body the calisthenics of resigned despondency.' The narrator isn't married anymore, thank goodness. His time is his own, driving back from this vacation. He has the leisure to stop at a roadside bar for a beer that tastes 'like snail slime and bath foam.' He has time to remember in great detail the horrors of the Portuguese colonial war in Angola. And in one or two sentences he does recall driving his beloved daughter somewhere; he glimpses her through his rearview mirror as she sleeps in the back seat, but that's as close as he'll ever get to anything remotely consoling or beautiful in all his life. Antunes has written plenty of these novels. They're in the tradition of Literature of Depression: One thinks of Sartre's 'Nausea' or Nathanael West's 'Miss Lonelyhearts,' which contains this immortal sentence about a garden in a New York public park: 'Flowers would then spring up, flowers which smelled of feet.' The distinguishing characteristic of this literature is that it's never the protagonists who are found wanting, but the nature of the world itself. In fact, the protagonists are often seen as a cut above the rest of humanity because they have discovered the intrinsic vileness of all material manifestation. They see the world as it 'really' is, and thus get to pose the question, 'Why do people kill themselves?' on pages 239, 240, 242, 246, 251 and 256. We lesser humans just have to listen to them. But I would counter with another question: Why should I pay good money for this experience when I got it at home free of charge from my mother, who was far more ingenious and cunning in the way she framed her contempt for all things in the tawdry material world? Why should I pay for a rehash of Sartre at his saddest and West at his most morose? I would just say this about 'Knowledge of Hell': By all means read it if it supports your point of view. But refrain from giving it to a troubled adolescent, and try not to read it (as I did) when you have a bad case of the flu." Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Synopsis: 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 Antunes on a journey both real and phantasmagorical as he travels by car from a vacation in the Algarve back to his hated work as a psychiatrist at a Lisbon mental institution. 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.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781564784360
- Author:
- Antunes, Antonio Lobo
- Publisher:
- Dalkey Archive Press
- Translator:
- Landers, Clifford E.
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Psychiatrists
- Subject:
- Portugal
- Series:
- Portuguese Literature
- Publication Date:
- March 2008
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 298
- Dimensions:
- 8.28x5.86x.81 in. .86 lbs.
Other books you might like
-
-
-
-
-
-
Related Aisles
|
