Böcker av Antonio Lobo Antunes

A polyphonic novel set over the course of three days, Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach is a stunning meditation on memory and time from Antonio Lobo Antunes, considered by many to be Portugal’s greatest living writer.The year is 2011, and our aging narrator has returned to Alto da Vigia to say goodbye to the house where her family spent summers during her childhood. Divided into three sections, one for each day that she spends at the home, Midnight is Not in Everyone’s Reach unspools in torrents of dialogue and surreal, feverish scenarios.Over these three days, the dead return to life, time splinters and freezes, and conversations flow from the past into the present and back again, as we journey across the narrator’s corrosive psyche toward our real destination—the place inside herself where the family’s grief-stricken secrets are kept.

A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal's most celebrated writers

"Antâonio Lobo Antunes's twenty-fifth novel, Commission of Tears (2011, Comissäao das Lâagrimas) is set during the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002). Angola attained official independence on November 11, 1975 and, while the stage was set for transition, a combination of ethnic tensions and international pressures rendered Angola's hard-won victory problematic. As with many post-colonial states, Angola was left with both economic and social difficulties which translated into a power struggle between the three predominant liberation movements. The People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), formed in December of 1956 as an offshoot of the Angolan Communist Party, had as its support base the Ambundu people and was largely supported by other African countries, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. In this novel, Antunes delves into this traumatic period of Angola's history through the fragmented memories and dreams of a broken woman. The author drew from the story of the commander of the female battalion MPLA who was tortured and killed following the state coup of May 1977. It is said that while they tortured her she did not stop singing. This is the story of Cristina, admitted in to a psychiatric clinic in Lisbon. In her torrent of memories, dialogues and traumatic episodes, Cristina remembers her early childhood in Africa, at the time when everything inside her head was intertwined with her father's voice, who was a former Black priest and became one of the torturers of the "Commission of Tears." Cristina's white mother, a cabaret dancer imported from Lisbon to entertain Portuguese farmers in Angola, marries the Black ex-priest because she finds herself pregnant with Cristina by the man who exploits her, the cabaret manager. The long, twisting narrative weaves together the three voices of daughter, father, and mother as they recall the terrors of their life in Angola, and their own suffering. Their personal tragedies, scarred by racism and abuse, mirror those of the country that is being torn asunder around them"--

Set in the aftermath of the ¿Carnation Revolution¿ of April 25, 1974, Antonio Lobo Antunes¿s Warning to the Crocodiles is a fragmented narrative of the violent tensions resulting from major political changes in Portugal. Told through the memories of four women who spend their days fashioning homemade explosives and participating in the kidnap and torture of communists, the novel details the clandestine activities of an extreme right-wing Salazarist faction resisting the country¿s new embrace of democracy.Warning to the Crocodiles (Exortação aos Crocodilos) has won:- Best Novel by the Portuguese Writers Association (Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela da Associação Portuguesa de Escritores) (1999)- The D. Dinis Prize of the Casa de Mateus Foundation (Prémio D. Dinis da Fundação Casa de Mateus) (1999)- The Austrian State Literature Prize (Prémio de Literatura Europeia do Estado Austríaco) (2000)

"Brilliant...harrowing...Packs the impact of an exploding mortar shell." -Kai Maristed, Los Angeles Times