Portuguese Fiction: António Lobo Antunes is generally referred to as Portugal's "other" novelist - after Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago, that is. In reality, though, he is the bolder, more imaginative, and more intellectually-stimulating writer.
While Saramago's recent fiction seeks to vindicate a world which, to his mind, bourgeois society regards as petty and insignificant - minor civil servants, copy editors, teachers and the like - viewing their lives through the rosy lens of a consoling humanity and charm, Lobo Antunes tackles bigger questions about Portugal's recent traumatic past - issues which, admittedly, lie below the surface in some of the Nobel Laureate's more substantial works, such as Baltasar and Blimunda and The Stone Raft.
Lobo Antunes's feisty masterpiece, O Esplendor de Portugal (shamefully still untranslated, seven years after it was first published) uses savage irony to explore the fracture line between a still-prevalent interpretation of Portugal's glorious past - the era of the discoveries, of an empire stretching over three continents - and the squalid reality of everyday life in that empire and in postcolonial Portugal itself. Like all Lobo Antunes's works, the novel sabotages the "official" view of Portugal (and it's one we perhaps share) as a flourishing democracy, economically successful and secure within the EU. His aim? To prevent, as he puts it in Act of the Damned, our consigning to the dustbin of memory the "white peace - shapeless and flat - of the Salazar dictatorship".
Given Lobo Antunes's insistent desire to interrogate Portuguese history and society, The Inquisitor's Manual is aptly named, though the title is meant to be ironic. The novel focuses on Salazar's Portugal, demonstrating how fascism can penetrate to the heart of a society, infecting family relations and individual behaviour with its patriarchal brutality and moral baseness. In the manner of Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemo Cruz, another great dissection of an ignoble past, The Inquisitor's Manual is constructed around a series of memories of a supposedly glorious professional career which are juxtaposed with the sordid reality of physical and mental decay. So we see the novel's protagonist, Senhor Francisco - also referred to as "the Minister", since he is a henchman of the Regime - at his prime, metaphorically abusing the nation as he literally abuses his cook (by whom he has a daughter he sends to be raised elsewhere), not to mention the steward's daughter, the sergeant's wife, a series of maids . . . and so on. Then we see him old and decrepit, living in a nursing home where, to take an obvious example, the chant of the nurses, "Time to go wee wee, Senhor Francisco" (persistently italicised for emphasis), cuts through his earlier bullish refrain, "I do everything a woman wants except take my hat off, so that she won't forget who's boss".
The strange thing about Lobo Antunes's works is it that, despite their shabby world and ignominious characters, they possess an energy and imaginative power that takes one's breath away. If Fuentes is one possible antecedent, William Faulkner is clearly another. Lobo Antunes's sprawling narratives - there are well over a dozen so far - intersect to create a kind of Portuguese version of the physical and mental landscapes of Yoknapatawpha County, rambling through the past and peering into the deepest recesses of the human psyche. They offer a robust, bitter-sweet vision of a country which, in the words of Lobo Antunes's heroine in The Natural Order of Things, "I hate from having loved it so much".
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes lectures in the Department of Spanish at UCD
The Inquisitor's Manual. By António Lobo Antunes. Translated by Richard Zenith, Grove Press, 435pp. $25