Synopses & Reviews
António Lobo Antunes is one of the great European literary masters, a writer of whom
The Boston Globe has said, "When Antunes is in full heat...he reads like William Faulkner or Céline." An international best-seller and the novel that established Antune's reputation in Europe,
The Inquistors' Manual is a harrowing indictment of Portuguese fascism.
The Inquistors' Manual chronicles the decadence not just of a family but of an entire society a society morally and spiritually vitiated by four decades of totalitarian rule. Senhor Francisco, a once powerful state minister and a personal friend of the Portuguese dictator Salazar, is incapacitated by a stroke, and as he spends his last days in a nursing home in Lisbon, he reviews his life and his loves. His son João, raised by the housekeeper, grows up to be good-hearted but totally inept, so that his ruthless in-laws easily defraud him of his father's farm. The minister's daughter, Paula, whom he had by the cook and who was raised by a childless widow in another town, is ostracized after the Revolution due to her fathers position in Salazar's regime.
The emotional turmoil enveloping Francisco's family finally catches up with him when the Revolution ends the forty-two years of the dictatorship, and the old regime tumbles like a castle of cards. Senhor Francisco, more paranoid than ever, remains a large but empty shadow of his seeming omnipotence. The Inquisitors' Manual is simultaneously an inquiry into the difficult coexistence of self-affirmation and tenderness toward others, and a powerful examination of a totalitarian sensibility.
Review
"Many of [the] speakers conjure up a collage of voices as they tell their stories, and the interviews become progressively more narrative, graphically describing the regime of Salazar. With this tapestry of harrowing testimonials, the supremely confident Antunes illuminates a dark corner of European history and produces a stunning piece of narrative art." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
"Antunes experiments with language and ideas in a story both allusive and surreal....In so dark a tale there can be no chirpy affirmations, but only telling indictments of the corrupt, the cruel, and the unjust and these Antunes memorably accomplishes." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"[A] remarkable novel....Antunes brings these characters to life through their own stories, from their own viewpoints....A gripping tale of the struggle of people to live under an oppressive, omnipresent government, presented without any specific plot or coherent line of events." Michael Spinella, Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"Lobo Antunes, one of the most skillful psychological portraitists writing anywhere, renders the turpitude of an entire society through an impasto of intensely individual voices. Unable to filter present from past, dialogue from echo, his multiple narrators bring us with them as they eddy through the dark backwaters of a lost half-century." The New Yorker
Review
"Antunes's razor-sharp eye dissects the outsized shadow cast by this fallen minister of state in all of its paranoia-induced variations. Remarkable for its descriptive exuberance, this book is recommended for larger collections." Library Journal
Review
"The Inquisitors' Manual is not so much an allegory of fascism as an anatomy of the way it penetrates societies....The story takes shape like a painting, its pattern gradually emerging as the artist traverses and re-traverses its surface....Personal nightmares become national tragedies, in turn breeding new and ever fiercer nightmares." William Deresiewicz, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"A brilliant performance. Too often, novelistic treatments of life under a dictatorship are unrelentingly bleak, but Lobo Antunes's witnesses are wonderfully diverse in their testimonials: Some are bitter, but others are funny, sarcastic or simply clueless....Together, they provide a panoramic view of recent Portuguese history that is impressive both as a work of art and as a condemnation of fascism." Steven Moore, The Washington Post
Review
"Antunes creates voices with a scrupulous, authorial neutrality....He also has created a character in Senhor Francisco...as complex in his cunning, blindness, selfishness and casual brutality as King Lear." Thomas McGonigle, The Los Angeles Times
Review
"Vast and masterful....A scathing critique of the regime of fascist dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, but it's also a domestic drama chronicling the ruin of an aristocratic family during the Communist revolution of the mid-1970's. Brimming with sex, violence and decadence, The Inquisitors' Manual has the sweep of a grand Bertoluccian saga." Dodie Bellamy, San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Fiery and starling....Antunes' obsessive rendering of each character exerts a coherent force on the sprawl of the novel....It has been said that to read this master of a dozen novels is like trying to board a fast-moving train, and indeed, it is an exhilarating and consuming experience to get on board." Wingate Packard, The Seattle Times
Review
"A vivid exploration of life under one of the worst dictators of the last century." Michael Shelden, The Baltimore Sun
Review
"In this, perhaps Lobo Antunes's blackest novel to date, what impels the reader through the hopeless, loveless landscape he paints is the sheer energy of the writing, the scalpel-sharp eye for physical and psychological detail and the parade of vivid characters voicing their discontents and desires." Margaret Jull Costa, Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)
About the Author
António Lobo Antunes, who has been called 'one of Portugal's pre-eminent writers' by The New York Times, was born in Lisbon in 1942, where he still resides. The son of a physician, he too became a doctor and then spent four years in the Portuguese army during the Angolan war. His fictional 'memoir' of that war, South of Nowhere, was internationally praised and followed by other widely translated and much-honored novels, including Act of the Damned, Fado Alexandrino, Explanation of the Birds, and The Natural Order of Things.