Portuguese Literature

The Splendor of Portugal's four narrators are members of a once well-to-do family whose plantation was lost in the Angolan War of Independence; the matriarch of this unhappiest of clans and her three adult children speak in a nightmarish, remorseless gush to give us the details of their grotesque family life. Like a character out of Faulkner's decayed south, the mother clings to the hope that her children will come back, save her from destitution, and restore the family's imagined former glory. The children, for their part, haven't seen each other in years, and in their isolation are tormented by feverish memories of Angola. The vitriol and self-hatred of the characters know no bounds, for they are at once victims and culprits, guilty of atrocities committed in the name of colonialism as well as the cruel humiliations and betrayals of their own kin. Antunes again proves that he is the foremost stylist of his generation, a fearless investigator into the worst excesses of the human animal.

António Lobo Antunes's twenty-fifth novel, Commission of Tears (2011, Comissão das Lágrimas) 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, Lobo 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 (Popular movement for the liberation of Angola) 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 her 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)

A man and a woman meet in Lisbon and fall in love. City of Ulysses is their story, and the city's love story besides. It is a story that leads readers down multiple paths, through myth and history, reality and fantasy, literature and the visual arts, the past and the present, male and female relations, the crisis of civilization and the need to reimagine the world.

A Voyage to India is the story of Bloom, our hero, as he makes his way from Lisbon to India in a decidedly non-heroic age. Gone are the galleons, gone is god; so too the swords of the swashbuckler and sacerdotal certainty. In such an era, where is wisdom to be found? Bloom-ever deliberate, ever longwinded-takes his time getting to India, stopping first in London, then Paris and elsewhere in Europe, making friends, encountering enemies, recounting his life story, revealing the reasons for his flight from Lisbon and his vague hopes for and nagging fears about what he might find in India. Or within himself. His is a melancholic itinerary, an attempt to learn and forget. As our narrator flatly declares: "Life proceeds and is monstrous." Parodying The Lusiads, Luis de Camões's sixteenth-century Portuguese epic of seafaring exploration and naval prowess, Tavares's poem is a solemn requiem of sorts, an investigation into the psyche of humankind in a world where the advance of technology outpaces our ability (or desire) to theorize it, the search for wisdom has been abandoned, and old imperialist dreams have revealed themselves to be a postcolonial nightmare.