Antonio Lobo Antunes's "The Land at the End of the World"
A review by Adam Eaglin
For many years, Antonio Lobo Antunes and the late Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago have been widely considered the two leading men of letters in Portuguese literature, each with his own defenders and detractors. As men of Portugal, their various approaches to the country provide a striking comparison. Many of Saramago's novels, for instance, might be called globally nonspecific, set in locales without name or where the backdrop is ancillary to the story. But for Lobo Antunes, Portugal is more often the subject. Last summer Saramago died, and Lobo Antunes, now in his late seventies, remains one of the preeminent novelists living and writing in the Iberian Peninsula today. Still, despite international acclaim and the prevalence of his work in English translation, the psychiatrist and Colonial War veteran from Lisbon seems relatively underappreciated beside his Nobel peer. Nevertheless, Lobo Antunes has been highly popular in Portugal and Europe since the late 1970s. His second novel, ...
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