Category: PORTUGAL

The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

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The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

Portuguese literature

Original title – O Esplendor de Portugal

Translator Rhett McNeil

Source – Personal copy

As I said in the last post, the run-up to the Nobel usually sees me reading a few Nobel hopefuls. With all that happened, I’m a little late reviewing them. I had thought it might be Atune’s year to win. He is the soul of his country’s past, a man who experienced much of what he writes about as a doctor who served in the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Having spent time in Angola in the seventies, this book looks back at that period, but as he does, he also observes the fall of other colonies in southern Africa, such as the Belgians in Congo. But what struck me as I read this is the parallel with events and feelings in Vietnam and the American experience in that war.

There’s something terrible in me. Sometimes at night the rustling of the sunflowers wakes me and, in the darkness of the bedroom, I feel my womb growing bigger with something that is neither a child, nor swelling, nor a tumor, nor illness, it’s some sort of scream that, instead of coming out of your mouth, comes out of your entire body and fills up the fields like the howling of dogs, and then I stop breathing, grab the headboard hard and a thousand stems of silence slowly float inside the mirrors, awaiting the dreadful clarity of morning. At such times I think I’m dead, surrounded by workers’ huts and cotton, my mother already dead, my husband already dead, their places at the table faded away, and now I live in mere rooms, empty rooms whose lights I turn on at dusk to disguise their absence. As a child, before we came back to Angola, I watched the lynching of the town lunatic in Nisa. Kids on the street were afraid of him, dogs ran away from him if he happened to pass by, he stole tanger-ines, eggs, flour, would install himself in front of the high altar and insult the Virgin, one day he flayed the belly of a calf from its neck to its groin, the animal walked into the town square tripping over its own entrails, the farmers from the nearby farm grabbed the lunatic

This long passaage of the mother about the things she had seen caught me !

What this book does so well is capture the whole effect of the fall of Angola through the prism of one family and their servants. The Alemida Family is led really by the Mother Isilda, a strong woman who is like a lot of people of her generation, proud of their settler life in Angola and what they have as a  life. This is set over two times in the late seventies as Angola starts to fall. How the family copes with this from Father Amadeu, who seems to have just accepted the fall and has sunk into the bottle. The children from the Oldest Carlos is he really Amadeu’s son, is something he feels, looking as though he may be mixed-race. Rui, the middle child, we see later on, is broken and in an institution after all that had happened, and he saw it when he was a child. Then, the youngest of the three children, Clarisse, is a wild, angry woman who uses her lovers to seek revenge on her family in a way. The book also sees them many years later, after the events in 1978 in Lisboa, as they gather in 1995 for a Christmas meal. The chapters alternate, and we see the events from all angles of the family.

for the most part, his epilepsy an earthworm gnawing holes in his head, my mother used to take him to the doctor in Malanje, when she returned home with him, even though shed bought a handkerchief for herself, you could tell shed been crying, she left Rui in the kitchen went upstairs and took ages to come down to the dinner table, her eyes swollen and her voice worn-out, piercing everything with her stare but not noticing anything at all, refusing to eat the soup, refusing to eat the fish, lying on her bed at night, you could hear her sobbing mixed with the thousands of other noises without origin or cause that inhabit the silence, I shook Clarisse and Clarisse

I liked the desciption of Rui epilepsy being like an earthworm through his brain !

I was reminded of this as I watched the film Apocalypse Now, which had similar themes to this book, especially in the new redux version, during the part where they spent time with the French plantation owner. Because in a way, this is Portugal’s Vietnam and the horrors that happened at the time, but also the way it has affected the country since. This is what I love about Atunes’s writing: it is dark but captures the horror of it all, and how it affected each member of the family. I have seen him described as Faulkner-like in his writing. For me, this has echoes of the polyphonic voices Faulkner had in something like As I Lay Dying. The same dark gothic feel. I was surprised by how they didn’t admit defeat until the troops were at the next plantation to theirs. It captures the dying embers of colonialism and the effects on this one family all those years later. Each member has reacted and coped in their own way with the horrors and the loss of that time. I always feel he has seen this firsthand in the seventies, as he was a doctor during the Angolan war. Have you read any books that make you feel the horrors and pain as though you were there? As for the Nobel, I hope he does win one day, but hell, he is in his mid-80s, get around to it, guys!

 

 

The Land at The End of the World by Antonio Lobo Antunes

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The Land at the End of The World by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Os Cús de Judas

Translator – Margaret Jull Costa

Source – Personal copy

I was talking earlier on Twitter about Antunes, and I a quote from him when he found out Saramago had won the Nobel prize; he said it had gone to the wrong Portuguese writer. It was a comment about Saramago and how his books are good but not ones that you think about for weeks after finishing them. For me, that is what Anutnes has. He has the richness of Faulkner, like someone else, like Ernaux. He mines his own and his own country’s dark past. he is one of those writers that once you have read, you will continue reading his book linger in your mind for weeks after you put them down. I have Frank Wynne to thank. He suggested in the early years of this blog that he should be a writer and I should try. Antunes, like the character in this book, spent time in the 70s as a doctor during the war in Angola. This is drawn from what he saw when he was there.

No. im no in any pain, athough my head does ache a lite butit’s nothing, a feeling, a touch of dizziness. The monotonous buzz of talk, the mingled smells, the way faces shift and rearrange themselves in the act of speaking, make me giddy: I don’t know anyone here, I rarely frequent these exotic temples where people no longer sacrifice the entrails of animals but their own livers, these modern catacombs given a kind of sacrilegious religious feel by the votive lamps of strange lights and the prayerful murmur of conversation, and where the barman is the golden calf, motionless behind the high altar of the bars, surrounded by the deacons or habitués, who raise a ritual glass of black velvet in his honor. Thymol crosses stand in for crucifixes, we fast at Easter in order to lower our cholesterol levels, on Sundays our Holy Communion wafers take the form of detox vitamins, we confess our infidelities to our group analyst, and our penance is his monthly bill: as you se, nothing has changed, except that now we consider ourselves to be atheists because, instead of beating our breast, the doctor does this for us with the end of his stethoscope.

One of his conversations rich and about the church over there

The book’s original title, as we are told in the Intro by the Translator Jull Costa, is a Portuguese term that means back and beyond, or as many of you may know, I love the word hinterland for this. It follows a doctor, and you are his interlocutor, his sounding board for what he sees whilst he is surviving the horrors of the war as he meets a woman in a bar. What we get is a snippet-like view of those war years it like e has little bits he is slowly letting out as he talks to her but the horror of the things he saw. In the field hospital, going and find young men blown up by mines and such the conditions they had to great the men in these are long sentences that draw you into his world of blood and war. This is one man’s account of a brutal and eye-opening war to him and everyone involved.

I got married, you see, four months before I left for Angola, it was on a sunny August afternoon, and my memory of the occasion is confused but intense, the sound of the organ, the flowers on the altar, and the family’s tears lent an improbably gentle Buñuelesque touch, and after a few brief weekend encounters, during which we made urgent love, inventing a kind of desperate tenderness full of the anxiety of imminent separation, we said good-bye in the rain, at the dockside, not crying but clinging to each other like orphans.And now, six thousand miles away, my daughter, the fruit of my sperm, whose slow subterranean growth beneath the skin of her mother’s belly I did not witness, suddenly burst into the communications hut, among newspaper cuttings and calendars bearing pictures of naked actresses

His marriage like many on there way to war

This is hard to describe as it is just a man talking about his time it drifts it has a rich, dark nature to his prose it has a little bit of someone like Laszlo Krasznahorkai or Bernhard, a bitterness to his words for someone from Portugal there involvement in Angola is like the US in Vietnam a war that was always doomed for all involved so this is like if Bela Tarr had done a cross between Mash and Apocplaypse now but in Angola, it has the blood and gutters the doctors see but also the pointlessness of what they are doing in that way it also has a nod towards the like of Beckett. One man trip into the hell of war and the aftermath on him as he sits at a bar with a woman and spills his guts as he tells about the blood and guts he had seen and the pointless nature of a war run by those who never take part in the actual war himself. I was reminded at points of the pointless nature of the war we see in the fourth series of Blackadder and the figures behind the lines directing the bloodshed. Have you read any of his books or this book for me this is maybe the best of his books I have read so far. There are three books by him on the blog, and I have several others to read. Hope you discovered him this month. For me, his is a potential Nobel winner

Winston score – A Doctor’s Horrors of war retold in a bar

 

 

The implacable order of things by José Luis Peixoto

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The implacable order of things by José Luis Peixoto

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Nenhum Olar

translator – Richard Zenith

Source – Personal copy

I hate it when the UK and US have different titles. I started to read this book, which I thought was another book by the Portuguese writer José Luis Peixoto that I had missed. I have a copy of Piano Cemetery somewhere; I hope it got misplaced in the move. I read Blank Gaze 13 years ago and had meant to read another book by him. He was at the time he wrote Blank Gaze, the youngest winner of the Jose Saramago book prize. But I hadn’t checked that this was a different book, so when I was about halfway through the book, I thought some of this sounded familiar, and then I found out it was Blank Gaze, the book I had read several years ago. But the US title is different anyway, so I continued to see if it was a book I still liked. And to review it 13 years later.

TO THE RIGHT OF OLD GABRIEL sat the two brothers with their parallel gazes, fixed on abstract, unfocused points. Their gazes were equal but didn’t see the same thing. They were the same gaze, seeing two different things. During the months when the oil press was idle, it was the brothers who looked after it. Always together, always at each other’s side, they had aged simultane-ously: they had the same curve in the back, the same halting gait, and, although they didn’t know it, the very same number of white hairs on their heads. Many more than seventy years had passed since the clear August morning when together they emerged from their mother’s womb, ripping her up inside. Old people told the story, which they’d heard from their parents, of how the mother, as soon as the umbilical cords were cut, looked and saw that they were Siamese twins. She died, without a word, a few minutes later. It was considered to be a terrible tragedy

The twins are born

The book, like yesterday’s book, is set in a village. This time, we move to the southern tip of Portugal to an unnamed town, and some of the locals, as we follow a few decades in this village, all come into contact with the devil. Firstly, a shepherd, Jose, works on the estate of the Mount of Olives, attending to the sheep. His wife is sleeping with a giant that is bullying Jose, all this is told to him by the devil. The book has an episodic feel and is filled with its share of odd characters, conjoined twins, inseparable but only connected at the tip of a finger. Fall in love with a cook who talks via her food, which she makes into art. This is an odd world. Add to that a blind prostitute to the mix a shop called Judas, and there is a religious overtones in this world of the village.

The sun of late September was almost as hot as the sun of August, but the season for sitting in the doorway at night had passed, and Moisés and the cook stopped seeing each other. But Moisés was the kind of man who won’t give up, and one day he thought: it has to be. The next day he again thought: it has to be.
The day after that he again thought: it has to be. And two weeks later he contrived to meet the cook at the door to the grocer’s.
They got married on a Saturday, the date of which they forgot.
Since the cook’s house was larger, it was the two brothers who moved. They loaded three wagons with chests and junk. They rented out their place for not very much money, but it helped pay expenses.

About the twin and the lover the cook.

I am not a bigger rereader, but this was a book I loved the first time around. It was one I loved in the early years of this blog. It stood up, and I liked how I noticed more of the religious overtones in the book.It has an episodic feel that shows the village around the Mount of Olives is a place that feels it is drifting on the edge of the Abyss with the devil causing trouble. This is a sunnier cousin to Satantango. This has nods to religious world names shared with figures from the bible. The devil tempts folks and tells folks home truths. I found it poetic again but this time it seemed a little darker than the first read. There is a menacing feeling behind this world. They are stuck in a sort of world that is dying but don’t know it as we see how, over time, things are changing as we watch it over a couple of generations. Have you ever read a book as the title differs from the UK edition especially after 13 years. I will get to Piano Cemetery, his other book in English. This has been wonderfully translated by Richard Zenith. Have you read any books by Peixoto ?

Winstons score – -A dark world on the abyss and the devil is hanging around ?

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by Jose Saramago

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Manual of Painting and Calligraphy by Jose Saramago

Portuguese fiction

Original title –  Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia

Translator – Giovanni Ponteiro

Source – Library edition

I’m having a slow Spanish / Portuguese  Lit month this year, but I aim to review mainly books from Portugal, which is the second from Portugal. This is also from the best-know Writer from Portugal, the late Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize. I picked this from the library because it was an earlier book I have reviewed a later novel and the earlier novel by him Skylight that came out a few years ago in English for the first time. It also came not long after the fall of the fascist regime in Portugal that had reigned the country for many years. The book looks at the later part of the Salazar regime and the use of the Painter and Industrialist as the book ends those hit by the government.

It was not until fifteen days later that S. explained why he wanted this portrait, so much at variance with his nature and outlook as a man of his time. I never ask my clients in this blunt manner why they decided to have their portrait painted. Were I to do so, I should give the impression of having little esteem for the work which provides me with a living. I must proceed (as I have always done) as if a portrait in oils were the confirmation of a life, its culmination and moment of triumph, and therefore accept the inevitable fact that success is the prerogative of the chosen few. To ask would be to question the right of these chosen souls to have their portrait painted, when this privilege is clearly theirs by right and because of the large sum of money they are paying and the sumptuous surroundings in which they display the finished work, which they alone appreciate according to how they value themselves.

Talking about the painting

The book follows an artist called H, who is commissioned to do a portrait of an Industrialist called just S. There is a fun line early on in the book when he passes comments on the art and how S looks in real life. While doing this, he also beds the great man, the secretary of S, while doing the painting. All this is told by H a man in the Bourgeois world of the regime just keeping in there by his art, which isn’t the best, but he dreams of being like the great artists of the world as he talks about their paintings, this saw a lot of looking up art like the man with grey eyes.All this is because he is having his fling with Olga. Alongside this, a close friend of his is arrested by the secret police and is in prison. He meets and has another fling with his friend’s sister. He talks about the pictures he has seen as he works on this second portrait of the great S. Another interesting was a list late on of great Portuguese novels and then trying to find them in English and discovering there were only a couple available to us in English.

In the presence of the couple from Lapa (reminiscent of certain characters in Portuguese novels: Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca by Júlio Dinis, A Morgadinha de Val-flor by Pinheiro Chagas, Os Teles de Albergaria by Carlos Malheiro Dias, As Donas dos Tempos Idos by Caetano Beirão, O Barão de Lavos by Arnaldo Gama, Os Maias by Eça de Queiroz and O Senhordo Paço de Ninães by Camilo Castelo Branco) the chameleon did not change its skin.

Boring but this was the liost of portuguese novels with just a few availlable in English

I like this book steeped in art. I think this is Saramago making a personal voyage around the art that has touched him as a writer. It is a very visual book but a book full of relationships that are passionate in nature but brief, firey sex and games. He fleshes out H as an artist with this. He is a man who has that artistic charisma, if not maybe the talent that always goes with it. It also has the backdrop of a secret police coming and taking artists and intellectuals.The latter bitter and of the Salazar regimes is burning in the background. the creative process seen through H eyes but also a man struggling with the desire to be like those great portrait artist he has seen over the years. Have you a favourite book by Saramago? Where next do I want to leave his big ones to review last. Have you a favourite book by him,

Winston score – B exciting look at an artist and what inspires him in the later years of the Salazar regime?sa

Joesph Walser’s machine by Gonçalo M. Tavares

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Joesph Walser’s machine by Gonçalo M Tavares

Portuguese Literature

Orignal title -A Máquina de Joseph Walser

Translator – Rhett McNeil

Source – personal copy

I am going to try and focus mainly on Portuguese writing this Spanish/Portuguese lit month. As for me, I felt it has been a country in Europe that, as a blog, I haven’t focused on or reviewed enough books from over the time I have blogged. But also, it is a country that isn’t mentioned much. I got a couple of novels from Gonçalo M Tavares. When I first came across him, I read Jerusalem, another book from this series of books he called his Kingdom series. They are all set in an unnamed country of vaguely Germanic country. His fellow Portuguese writer Jose Saramago said he would win the Nobel prize. His books have inspired plays art, videos and operas. I didn’t get around to reviewing Jerusalem, but I will get it reviewed at some point, as his other books are hard to get hold of now.

“No one wears shoes like that anymore.”

How many times had Joseph Walser heard that phrase in the last two weeks? What was going on? He had worn these shoes, or similar ones, for years. No one had ever bothered him about them before. No one had ever before cared about his shoes in the least, neither their color nor shape. Why now?

“I don’t care about your shoes or your ideas, do you understand, my dear Walser? What I told you yesterday isn’t important to me, but it is extremely important to you. Can you see the difference?

Can you see the difference that exists between the two of us?

Between my shoes and your shoes, between my ideas and your ideas? I’m not interested in your shoes and I’m not interested in your ideas. But you’re interested in my ideas; that’s the difference between us, you see

His shoes this made me smile as for me they always say oh your laces is loose as it is alway undone

The book opens with the lines that he was a strange man. That strange man was the lead character of the novel Joseph Walser a man living in an unnamed city. He is a man of routine and habits. But also the style of Joesph’s shoes, which are an older style. He is a man that stands out in a crowd. But what happens when the city he lives in is suddenly invaded? How will this man of routine be? As the world around him dissolves and the people and world he knows to start to change, he just wants to follow the routine of working on his machine and then, in the evening, play a game with people he knows. The chapters see little by little how he copes as one more thing is thrown in his way and in the way of his routine. What happens when a character stepping out of a lowry is stuck in a war?

Joseph Walser went out every Saturday night to Fluzst M.s house, where he played dice for low-stakes bets with three other work-mates. The five men all worked at the same factory. They were all low-level employees and made average wages. Over the years their passion for games of chance had brought them together. There was no exceptional friendship among them, but they rarely missed a Saturday. The amounts being bet in the game could be considered small, when compared with other underground games around the city, but in proportion to their wages the amounts were large. All five men were married; for the players, their wives were the most difficult thing about their gambling. There wasn’t a single wife who didn’t complain about her husband losing a certain amount of money in the game.

More of his routiune life here

Now, I have read this through my eyes. I am going through the process of a late diagnosis of Autism, having done several tests and scored high in them. So autism is in my mind at the moment, and when I read about Joesph Walser, it was like, yes, this guy is so autistic his life is led by a routine, but it seeing how he copes, which he does, but you can always see he may be on the verge of melting down as the world he knows collapse around him. This is a nod to how that war machine interferes with a man-machine in Joseph’s daily routine. Add to that his collection the hyperfocus a lot of autistic people have. Outside as ever, I connect with the book I am reading. This is just how I read. Connections over the distance between different worlds and lives give me the greatest pleasure. Still, that thread that runs between the fictional world and mine really connects me with literature in translation, which is, of course, my area of hyperfocus.I imagined Waslser as a lowry-like matchstick man marching through his city to his machine every day, and how would that connect to the horror of an invasion happening? Have you read any books from Tavares?

Winston’s Score B is a vital book with an exciting but mundane character’s reaction when his routine world is smashed and changed. Need to read more of this series.

The return of the Caravels by Antonio lobo Antunes

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The Return of the Caravels by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Portuguese fiction

Original title – As Naus

Translator – Gregory Rabassa

Source – Personal copy

There is a name that has for most of the time I have been blogging that has been on the list of potential Nobel winner Antonio Lobo Antunes is always on the list of potential winners. The former doctor served in the Portuguese army in a number of conflicts in the 60s and 70s they feature in a number of his book they have been in the two books I have previously read from Him. Here also there is a feel of the aftermath of those conflicts. He has written a bi-weekly column for a Newspaper he has written over twenty novels he is influenced by William Faulkner in his style which is dense and modernist.

He’d passed through Lixbon eighteen or twenty years earlier on the way to Angloa and what he remembered best were his parents rooms in the boarding house on Conde redondo where they were staying in the midst of a clatter of pots and womans exsoerated grumbling. He recalled the communal bathroom, a washbasn with a set of baroque faucets inimtation of fish that vomited out sobs of brownish water through there open gils, and the time he came upon a man on in years smiling on the the toilets with his pants down around his knees . At night the window would be open and he’d see the illuminated Chinese restuarents, the sleepwalking glaciers of electrical appliances stores in the shadows, and blond heads of hair above the paving stones of the sidewalks.

The opening lines show how the past and opresent mix together.

Inside the Jeronimos Monastery In Lisbon, there is the copper insignia that were on the ships from Portugal those Caracvels those ships the Portuguese used when they conquered their empire. Well, this book mixes those figures famous for the discovery and conquering those lands have returned to a mix of Modern well it is the mid-seventies after the falling apart of the Salazar regime and the decision to leave their empire so when figures like Vasco  De Gama the king, smaller figures like Luis as they all return and see what has happened the journey of their empire has gone full circle as the past and present crash and the figures of the past drift into the present as they see what has happened over the past three hundred years of history as the fate of their empire and its downfall is shown in full color this isn’t a plot-driven book it is more a revision and view of the past and present at once it is about the Portuguese empire and its downfall. the darker side of all is shown like in his other works he doesn’t hold back.

When Vasco da Gama arrived in Vila franca de Xira by van, with the poker deck in his pocket, ain=ming to find work at the cobbler’s trade, instead of the trees and houses and streets he’d remembered at night in Africa with meticulous precision of longing, he found a land that had extended beyond the rooftops and the pagoda of the bandstand submerged in the vast spread of the halted waters of the Tagus, drowning farms,cows and walls abd driven by November rains. Famlies clinging to the tops of poplar trees saw passing by, adrift in the whirlpools of mud, the bloated bodies of bereaus mules and dogs, double basses lost their clefs forever, woman with their figers motionless in sewing gestures, and their mugs thatr said souvenir of Loule.

Vasco De Gama one of those figures to return to the present

This is a tough book about a tough period in his countries history. What he does is mix those great names of the past and the underbelly of what has happened since. It looks at what the likes of Da Gama Legacy mean for them. Style-wise this is a book that owes a lot to the writers he likes Faulkner springs to mind it is a work about thoughts and ideas more than a plot about the legacy good and bad about the Portuguese empire with warts and all that has happened there are little side stories like Luis who comes to Lisbon on a ship and his father’s coffin. The mix of past and present in the world that sees the modern and the [ast as one is an interesting insight into the heart of the Portugal of the time. It is like a mixtape of Portuguese history with rifts on top of rifts as he samples the past and presents working them in together to produce something unique a seem less mixing of both that has been beautifully translated by Gregory Rabassa who for me has always been one of the best translators around.

Winstons score – + A stunning like a rich dessert it is intense and full of flavors of Portuguese history!!

Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago

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Death at Intervals by Jose Saramago

Portuguese Literature

Original title – As Intermitências da Morte 

Translator – Margaret Jull Costa

Source – personal copy

I have had a real bout of readers block and reviewing block as well in recent weeks. I thought I had reviewed a Saramago early on in the blog but I hadn’t I just read a couple just before I started the blog. I decided to choose this as it had a lot of themes that Saramago used. The strange change of events here people stop dying. death it’s self a theme in other books I have read by him also it has the same style of the narrative he used in other books a stream of consciousness style and it was a later book in his writing career I always like seeing how writers wrote after the fame and Nobel win. It is over ten years since he died and Well maybe we need to read more of this great writer’s books.

THE FOLLOWING DAY ,NO ONE DIES, THIS FACT< BEING ABSOLUTELY contray to life’s rules, provoked enormous and, in the circumstances, perfectly justifiable anxiety in people’s ,ind, for we have ony to consider that in the enitire forty volumes of universal history there is no mention, not even one exemplarycase, such a phenomen ever having occurred, for a whole day  to go by, woth its genrous ever having occured for a whole day to go by, with its generous allowance of twenty-four hours, diurnal and nocturnal, matutinal and vesoertine, without one death from an illness , a fatal fall or a successful suicide, not one, not a single one

The opening lines of the book on the 1 January  everything changes.

The book starts in a country landlocked and the new year has just turned and then all of a sudden everyone in the country stops dying. This at once see as a wonderful joy among the public as a whole when it is clear there is no more deaths. But soon turns bad when an elderly royal on death’s door can’t die and she isn’t the only one. As the cycle that carries on living the whole cycle of life and death is broken by death stopping it , putting a branch in the wheel of life. So those that are involved in the whole cycle of life are worried the prime minister of this small country with its one tv channel may be his nod to the closed years of Portugal’s own past. Then Death is a  back ut in the figure of a person. After her taking a break she is a woman as in Portugal the noun of Death is female she sets up a relationship with a cellist that has to avoid her calls for her time to be over sets up an interesting match up. over what time it is best to die this is a book that asks about are our own mortality, by a writer looking back on his life.

in this country in which noonje dies not everything was a sordid as we have just described, nor,in this soceity toen between the hope of living for ever and the fear of never dying, did the voracious maphia succeed in getting its talons into every section by corrupting souls, subjagating bodies and besmirching the little that remained of the fince principles of oldm when an envelope containing something that smelled of a bribe would have been immediately returned to the sender, bearing a firm and clear response

later the reality of no deaths. Finally sinks in to everyone

The book has a lot of threads that connect to his other books the church and immortality is a theme that is very Saramago he frequently attacks the church which is a powerful shadow over Portugal grew up in there is also nods to the Salazar regime in the one tv state here an insular country. Death as a woman is refreshing for an English reader as we have death as a male from the image in Seventh seal or the spoof of that in Bill and ted, here we have a younger death a woman in a battle with a middle-aged man a cellist the lead cellist a nod to certain pieces played that deal with death. This ask the question of what would happen if we lived forever. We are all dying that is a fact of life and this is what is evident after time here as good as it seems on the outset after the first day of no deaths. when the flip side of what happens when you can’t die !! Like many of the other books by Saramago, I have read this leaves you as a reader thinking he uses a mix of magic realism fables, philosophy, and his own life to mix a truly unique vision. Have you a favorite book by him? I will be reviewing another great Portuguese writer soon.

Winstons score – A a great late-career work from a Nobel winner

 

 

Kokoschka’s doll by Alfonso Cruz

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Kokoschka’s Doll by Alfonso Cruz

Portuguese Fiction

Original title – A Boneca de Kokoschka

Translator – Rahul Bery

Source – review copy

I join a blog tour on the day this comes out. I always feel Portuguese literature is a blank area of the blog over the years. So when I got the chance to read a book by the leading light of the Portuguese literature Alfonso Cruz he has published a number of novels this is the second to be translated into English. He is a novelist, artist, illustrator, and member of a blues group called The soaked Lamb (love that band name I must try and find some of his music). This book won the European Union Prize for Literature, I shall be covering another winner in a day or two.

At the age of Forty-two, or , to be more precise, two days after his birthday that year, Bonifaz Vogel began to hear a voice. Intially he thought it was the muce, then he thought about calling someone to deal with the woodworm, but something stopped him. Perhaps ti was the way the voice had given him orders, with the authority of those voices that live deep inside us. He knew it was all in his head, but he had the strange sensation that the words were coming from the floorboars, entering him through his feet. They came from the depths, filling the bird shop. Bonifaz Vogel always wore sandals, even in winter , and hr felt the words slipping through his yellowed toenails

The opening lines just drew me in as a reader. worth noting Vogel is German for bird!!

Now, this is one of those books that you in one part love and in another absolutely hate at times just as it isn’t a linear narrative of a patchwork of little piece stuck together we have three main narratives the first sees Bonifaz Voge who is the owner of a bird shop in Dresden he hears voices from under his floorboards This is just as the bombs in the latter part of the war have fallen and in his cellar Isaac Dresner who end up thereafter he saw a jews friend shot. He starts to talk to the man Vogel who thinks the voice he hears through the floorboards. Vogel thinks it is god and Dresner becomes this man’s inner monologue.  Then we move onto the book within the book a novella called Kokoschka’s doll by Mathias pope a work about the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka who when his Alma Mahler left him he got a life-size doll made of her. That he took out and strolled with and eventually he smashed a bottle of red wine over her head. In an interview with the writer on youtube, he said he used this as a metaphor for the book as a whole. But also the story of the Varga’s another thread of stories with chapters that are randomly numbered. The latter book is about the novella in the second part of the book and how it is received. The three parts of this novel all interlink this is collection of stories with a dash of Aphorisms and philosophy. There is no clear way to describe this book it is a gem of snippets that see you go around the world and view the same events at views.

FROM OUR FLESH WE WILL MAKE A SINGLE EARTH

” I have always wondered who will bury the last man” my grandfather said to my father, “or in this case who will bury the gravedigger. You will, of courser. You are not a gravedigger, but you will bury me in the same earth as your mother, who died as you took your first breath almost three times seven years ago. Her earth will mix with mine, as it did in life, and from our flesh we will make a single earth”

When my grandfather died, my father did as he wished and they were mixed together for ever

one of the snippets from the opening part called the memoir of Isaac Dressner

I said I feel I haven’t read enough Portuguese literature and I always feel the same after reading books from there the deepness of there writers is always stunning from Pessoa who’s complete The Book of Disquiet I read when it came out the other year but haven’t had time to review I will be doing this soon it maybe would show how we get to writers like Cruz as Pessoa uses a lot of Aphorisms and the is no real linear narrative to the Book of disquiet. Then I have read more modern writers like Peixoto and Antunes both often use different strands in the narrative Peixoto had an odd collection of characters like this book does. I feel this is one for the readers of books like Sophie’s world or night train to Lisburn books that make you think and puzzle that have so much more at the heart and this is one it is about war the aftermath love and loss and life in general and will have you thinking for days after you have put it down.This book was made possible by a grant from –

Skylight by José Saramago

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Skylight by José Saramago

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Claraboia

Translator – Margaret Jull Costa

Source – Personnel copy

I start this Spanish and Portuguese lit months with a Nobel winner. But this is one of those books that we wonder should have n=been published. Lost for years this was found at the publishers and dated from the early fifties thought Lost Saramago hadn’ t want it published in his lifetime. The publisher had wanted to release it in the 80s but Saramago said no and left it to his family to decide which they did. I am never sure about this type of work, I reviewed the lost debut novel of Georges Perec a few years ago that unlike this was different to the other Perec books I have read in this book there is a connection with the male characters to the other Saramago books I read years ago. I was surprised that I hadn’t review Saramago over the time of the blog anyway maybe this is a good intro to him on the blog the first work. I have a few others on my tbr pile to read.

Silvestre returned to his place at the window, wondering hiw the mistake could possibly have arisen. He knew full well that his handwriting was not of the finest, but it was, he thought pretty good for a cobbler, especially when compared with that of certian doctors. The only explanation seemed to be that hte newspaper had got it wrong. he sure it hadn’t been his mistake; he could see in his minds eye the form he had filled in and he had definetly put the ground floor, right. While engaged in theese thoughts, he remained focused on his work glancing out at the stree now and then, with the aim of spotting amoung the few passer bys anyone who migt be coming to see the room.

Silvestre misplaced the ad for the room but is at the window silent again .

Skylight is the tale of an Apartment building in Lisbon just after the end of world war two in 1952. Six flats mostly females that live in the flats. An elderly Cobbler Silvestre who we learned served in world war one and his rotund wife. They have been forced to take in a lodger a young man Abel a man who is about the age Saramago was when he wrote this book. I said this was the place to start with Saramago Silvestre is the typical male figure in a number of the other books I have read other the years by Saramago the working man getting on silently with life is a classic Saramago character. Then we have a pair of sisters spinsters as they would have been called then Adriana and Isaura listen to Beethoven turned up loud almost as they use their love of music as a substitute for Sex. Then a salesman Emilio and his Spanish with who have a very rocky marriage and use their young son as a weapon to try and can the upper hand in their marriage. A beautiful young typist who has a leary boss again sexual tensions.Elsewhere some one is selling their body for money.aetano and his wife coping with the loss of a child and in a brutal way at times.  A huddle of working class people some going up some of the level and other facing the void all living close to each other so much so that each of their lives is partly known to the others so.

Caetano was not looking at the photo, therefore his smile had nothing to do with his daughter’s. The smile in the photo bore no resemblance to his. The one in the photo was open and happy, and it was inly its fixed quality that made one uneasy. Caetano’s smile was lubricious, almost repellant, When grown up smile like that, they should not be in the prescence of childrens smiles, even smiles in photographs.

After leavinfg work, caetano had a little “adventure”, a sordid adventure – the kind he liked best. That’s why he was smiling. He enjoyed them twice over, once when he was experiencing them and again in retrospective.

Caetano a trubled character as shown above in this passage about a photo and a smile.

I have always been a fan of books set in buildings I mentioned Perec early on as this reminds me of his Life a user manual in a way as it shows the inner workings of this building. Another book I was reminded of was the yacobian building  by Alaa Al Aswanyt   the egypitian novel about another building like the Building in the Skylight a working class world a similar feel of fading world is in both worlds.  Another book was Taxi another egyptian novel with short glimpse and pictures of world as people catch a taxi. This is a discetion of the world Saramago saw at the time. The book has a strong undercurrent of sexual repression and desires were maybe to much for the Portugal of the time when he first wrote the book in the middle of the Salazar regime although this isn’t really about that more about being working class in the Lisbon of the time. and a great place to start with Saramago on the blog and his silent men.

Have you a favourite Saramago book?

What do you think about books that weren’t published in the writers life coming out ?

Fado Alexandrino by António Lobo Antunes

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Fado Alexandrino by António Lobo Antunes

Portuguese literature

Original title – Fado Alexabdrino

Translator – Gregory Rabassa

Source – Personal copy

When I choose to expand out Spanish lit month to include literature from Portuguese, one of the  writers I had in mind was another book by Antunes, I read knowledge of hell a couple of years ago and after that brought a number of his books to read in recent years he has been on the list of possible Nobel prize winners. This book is considered his best book. Antunes like the men in this book served in the military in Africa, he also worked as a doctor with men after the wars in Africa as a Psychiatrist.

“I was married and had a daughter this high “the second lieutenant said, smiling at the spoons the waiter was serving the mear with. “I was living on the Rue da Mae d’Agua, below the fountain, and after intimacies, even with the light off, I could see the round ball of the paper lamp, looking like an enormus moon, sowing Japanese ghosts in the darkness.(The breathing of his wife beside him and of his daughter in the otger room flooded the floor with a murmur of sounds that rose and sank like the soft flutter of a dress.

The men recall better days at times but always with a sense of loss in the words the say.

Fado Alexandro is a book in three parts that follow five men through the periods of their lives. Thye five men although four tell the story the fifth the captain of the men is in the background, the men are all in the military a soldier, a Lieutenant Colonel, a communication officer and a second lieutenant. The book opens in the years before the Revolution in Portugal and the war in Mozambique they all take apart, in fact, not all came back. Then there is the fall of the regime in the Carnation revolution, it is part of what happens there that cause the rest of their lives to go on the paths they did. Both lieutenants marriages fail and they take up with the different woman as one wife was upper class and a large amount is remembered of how hard it was for them to get together. Then there is buying a young girl in Africa. A death and the communication officer’s daughter tells her father story in the later section. The book follows the four as they all are scarred by war and their relationships with woman.

“Four of these lady friends plus the four  of us make eight hot whores ,” the lieutenant colonel told the second lieutenant , still suspious of the champagne , massaging his stomach. “What will your neighbours say when they see us ?”

Me, for example, I’m my mother, he thought , a ridiculous old woman who wore gauze, rings perfume, makeup and creams , her artifical nylon eyelashes fluttering like insect winhs, clumsily attempting to seduce the grocer in hop of a little discount on a jug of wine, because I started drinking towards the end of my life,

THe view of woman isn’t the best at times

This is a complex book about the time that followed the fall of Estado Novo regime following a coup by the military. The many wars in Africa as the Estado Novo tried to keep the old Portuguese colonies under their rule, in this case, Mozambique, Antunes spent time in Angola but both wars were very brutal in what happened there. Through the five men we see the brutal nature of the war is recounted in the stream of consciousness of the men’s lives and relationships, in particular, the  wives, woman they fuck and women the don’t fuck these are very nasty men in their natures All this book like Ulysses happens over one night as the four remaining men meet for a meal and get very drunk and recount their stories as record in the novel. So there is a sense at times of lines of the men and their stories blending that thing you get as men with a shared experience and recounting it the who, what, why and how can get blurred sometimes.  A powerful of men and war from a European version of what happened to American Vietnam in Africa.

The painter of birds by Lidia Jorge

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The painter of birds by Lidia Jorge

Portuguese literature

Original title – O Vale da Paixão

Translator – Margaret Jull Costa

Source – personal copy

Well, I managed to return after a busy while, my first lot of nights in my new job and a course and two long days meant the days off I had in between all this I hadn’t much chance to blog. But as I said last month I choose, to add some literature from Portugal, I looked up on Wiki a number of writers from the region and decided to choose those that were available second hand. Lidia Jorge is considered one of the leading voices of the new wave of writers that came after the Salazar regime. She spent time in Africa married to a military man then she lived with a well-known Journalist. This book won a number of prizes when it came out.THis book also covers woman in translation month.

For that reason,  on the night Walter Dias visited her, the bullets and the revolver were out of sight, and he wanted to take the gun away from her on that rainy night , he wanted to take the gun with him, but she realized that if he took it, when walter did disappearm he might disappear entirely. He even said to her “Don’t be silly!”But she couldn’t give him back the weapon. Giving it back would be like handing over the fragile link that bound his existance to hers.

They meet but she doesn’t want to let him go and break that bond that links them .

The painter of birds is the story when a young woman the narrator of the books starts to look back other her absent father’s life. SHe has a strained relationship with him and in the family farmhouse where she is just inland from the Algarve where Jorge grew up is salt worn from the sea. He painted pictures in his letter home from his many travels as she read through these letters and she sees the father she never really knew. There is no strong time line in the book so there is a real sense of the present and past drifting together as she reads and the world and place he went to coming alive.As the bits she knows the pictures family tales bring Walter Dias a man she only twice met in her younger years.A rogue of a man who left the nearest neighbours daughter her mother with child and started to travel the world with the army fighting in the various wars from the 30s onwards.

Francisco Dias used to talk about Walter too.

It was clear to him that black cloud hung over his youngest son. He would say so to anyone who would listen when he had free times on Sundays, before dozing off, though never speaking directly to Walter’s niece, but then he never spoke to her anywayy. He did not, however, conceal from her the difference between Walter and his other sons, should she care to hear, if she could hear.She walked among them as if she were deaf, and didn’t care whether she heard him or not.Francisco Dias put it all down to school, the place where, in his opinion, the life of a man was not only shaped but also summarized and foretold.THis is how he explained it.

Her grandfather had a very different view of his wayward son .

I like the narrative flow of this book it had a crime like pace but with a sense of  piecing  the past together piece by piece but also a sense of not seeing it all as Walter is a rogue but also does these wonderful bird pictures, but then there is the past of Walter from her  family tell her of him a man that ran out on her and her mother and briefly appeared in her she wants to love him, this will appeal to the fans of books like English patient as both share a sense of piecing  the past together from fragments and piece of gossip and side stories.

 

Knowledge of Hell by Antonio Lobo Antunes

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Knowledge of hell by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Conhecimento do Inferno

Translator – Clifford E Landers

Source – personnel copy

Well I can’t quite remember when i first heard of Antunes as a writer , I think it was back with an interview with Frank Wynne years ago. well the years went by I tried for a copy from the library they had one but it was a missing book. Then I had at times tried and failed to find him in book shops, but he seems to only be on shelves of larger waterstones or the LRB and then his books  seemed to have fallen behind what ever caught my eye that month. well a new shelf space at the new house has allowed me to bargain shop. Any way back to Antunes he was a psychiatrist and served in the portuguese army during the Angolan war he start to write a number of years after the wars, he mainly focused his early novels on the war years and its aftermath. This was his third novel.

The sea of the Algarve is made of cardboard like theater scenery, and the english don’t realize it: they conscientiously spread their towels on the sawust sand, protect themselves with dark glasses from the paper sun, stroll enthralled on the stage of Albufeira where public employees disguised as carnival barkers, squatting on the ground, inflict on them Moroccan necklaces secretly manufactured by the tourism board

The opening lines on leaving the Algarve Antonio Lobo Antunes is going home to Lisbon

There is almost a Borges type mirror to this story of a man driving home from his holiday in the Algarve back to Lisbon. Where the  narrator is working in the mental institution with the damage of the post war era of the Angolan conflict where he talks to those who suffered during the war. This si the journey home but almost like going back to hell as the spiral down the journey. As we see how the narrator who is also called Antonio Antunes like the writer himself struggles to control his role as listen helper and in a way god to those he is trying to heal.But he like many in his position is getting scared by those he is healing so the sadness falls as the near he gets to the centre.

I’ve never left the hospital, he thought as he received his change from the gasoline, observing the guy from whom the face, the gestures, the voice of Mr Carlos were slowly disappearing, the same way a smile dissipates in an old picture art the beach, or the acacias dissolves in the pale fog of October, as colourless and mute as the animals in dreams.Mr Carlos was slowly diappearing the employees were cleaning the windows of the station wagon in circular movements using a kind of sponge

he repeats the phrase I never left the hospital in this chapter as his mind wanders and he is remind of the hospital on his return journey.

This book is third in a trio of books he wrote on the Angolan war and its aftermath from the point of view of being a psychiatrist. I said this was like Borges with a mirror this is a reflective image of the writer himself but one with flaws like those old mirrors that twisted and bent the reflection in the light. I instantly got what everyone said about Antunes being a great writer , I don’t get the Faulkner comparison myself but there is a longing in his writing that almost sums up that portuguese word Saudade but a twist form of it a longing for what has happened not to have happened a sort of wishing the past away and want to remove the scars of a dark part of his country’s past. The wars in Angola were among the most brutal of african independence as Portugal struggled to keep a foothold in Africa. Have you read Antunes ?

Blank gaze by Jose luis Peixoto

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SOURCE – LIBRARY

Jose Luis Peixoto is a Portuguese  writer that grew up in the southern Alentejo region in Portugal  ,he is a journalist ,poet and critic ,he teaches languages and contemporary literature .he has a love of heavy metal and gothic music one of his other novels was a collaboration with the gothic band moonspell .he has written seven novels with this his début in English his latest in english is piano cemetery .

Well the main ingredients for Blank gaze are a Shepard ,a pair of Siamese twins ,an old man 120 years old Gabriel and a blind prostitute as you can see a strange mix all set in a southern portuguese village that is unnamed .when I first read the dust jacket II was expecting something  a little off the wall,but much to my size the novel is homely told in little tales as we see the village life births deaths and marriages through the eyes of the people who live there and a narrator .these moments are all caught vividly through Peixoto eye ,this is very much somewhere the writer new and char caters he grew up knowing adding to a real sense of reality to the prose .

People are a small part of the world ,and I don’t understand people .I know what they do and the immediate motives for what they do and the immediate motives for what they do , but to know this is to know what’s plain to see ,it’s to know nothing at all .I think : perhaps they exist ,with no explanation for it ; perhaps people are pieces of chaos on top of disorder they enclose .

some of Peixoto poetic writing .

This book has a real poets voice through out it and this has been wonderfully retained by Richard Zenith in the English translation .It in parts reminded me of stones in a landslide which I had read earlier in the year a similar sort of village isolated and timeless ,but there is a lot more wit in this book than stones in a landslide .I feel Peixoto is a talent to watch only in his mid thirties he may be the next big Portuguese writer to break through to the English market hopefully .

HAVE YOU REREAD HIS BOOKS ?

DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURIE BOOK FROM PORTUGAL ?