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.

On the tenth anniversary of the return of their battalion from Mozambique, five men attempt to rekindle the fraternal bond that helped them survive the colonial war that was Portugal's Vietnam. In turn, they tell the stories of their lives before, during, and after the revolution that overthrew the long-lived Salazar dictatorship. Internationally acclaimed for his fictionalized memoir of the Angolan war, Antunes has, with Fado Alexandrino, raised a fabulous Lisbon from the ashes of his four failed but unforgettable protagonists, and in the process has firmly established his reputation as the century's foremost novelist in the Portuguese language. Fado Alexandrino is one of the richest novels to come out of Europe in recent years. Moreover, it reveals a society and culture still too little known to the English-speaking world.

Like a Portuguese version of As I Lay Dying, but more ambitious, Antonio Lobo Antunes's eleventh novel 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. In this his masterful novel, Antonio 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. (The New Yorker) The protagonist and anti-hero Senhor Francisco, a powerful state minister and personal friend of Salazar, expects to be named prime minister when Salazar is incapacitated by a stroke in 1968. Outraged that the President (Admiral Americo Tomas) appoints not him but Marcelo Caetano to the post, Senhor Francisco retreats to his farm in Setubal, where he vaguely plots a coup with other ex-ministers and aged army officers who feel they've been snubbed or forgotten. But it's younger army officers who in 1974 pull off a coup, the Revolution of the Flowers (so called since no shots were fired, carnations sticking out of the butts of the insurgents' rifles), ending 42 years of dictatorship. Senhor Francisco, more paranoid than ever, accuses all the workers at his farm of being communists and sends them away with a brandished shotgun, remaining all alone - a large but empty shadow of his once seeming omnipotence - to defend a decrepit farm from the figments of his imagination. When the novel opens, Senhor Francisco is no longer at the farm but in a nursing home in Lisbon with a bedpan between his legs, having suffered a stroke that left him largely paralyzed. No longer able to speak, he mentally reviews his life and loves. His loves? In fact the only woman he really loved was his wife Isabel, who left him early on, when their son Joao was just a tiny boy. Francisco takes up with assorted women and takes sexual advantage of the young maids on the farm, the steward's teenage daughter, and his secretaries at the Ministry, but he can never get over the humiliation of Isabel having jilted him for another man. Many years later he spots a commonplace shop girl, named Mila, who resembles his ex-wife. He sets the girl and her mother up in a fancy apartment, makes her wear Isabel's old clothes, and introduces her to Salazar and other government officials as his wife, and everyone goes along with the ludicrous sham, because everything about Salazar's Estado Novo (New State) was sham - from the rickety colonial empire in Africa to the emasculate political leaders in the home country, themselves monitored and controlled by the secret police. Once the system of shams tumbles like a castle of cards, Francisco's cuckoldry glares at him with even greater scorn than before, and all around him lie casualties. Mila and her mother return to their grubby notions shop more hopeless than ever, because the mother is dying and Mila is suddenly a spinster without prospects. The steward, with no more farm to manage, moves his family into a squalid apartment and gets a job at a squalid factory. The minister's son, 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, which they turn into a tourist resort. 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 because of who her father was, even though she hardly ever knew him. Isabel, the ex-wife, also ends up all alone, in a crummy kitchenette in Lisbon, but she isn't a casualty of Senhor Francisco or of society or of a political regime but of love, of its near impossibility. Disillusioned by all the relationships she had with men, she stoutly resists Francisco's ardent attempts to win her back, preferring solitude instead. We have to go to the housekeeper, Titina, this novel's most compelling character, to find hope of salvation, however unlikely a source she seems. Unattractive and uneducated, Titina never had a romantic love relationship, though she secretly loved her boss, who never suspected. She ends up, like him, in an old folks' home, and like him she spends her days looking back and dreaming of returning to the farm in its heyday. Old age is a great equalizer. And yet the two characters are not equal. Titina retains her innocence. But it's not the innocence of helpless inability - the case of Joao, Francisco's son - nor is it the pathetic innocence of Romeu, the emotionally and mentally undeveloped co-worker by whom Paula has a son. Titina isn't helpless or ingenuous, and she isn't immune to the less than flattering human feelings of jealousy, impatience and anger. But she never succumbs to baser instincts. She knows her worth and cultivates it. She is a proud woman, but proud only of what she really is and what she has really accomplished in life. At one level (and it operates at many), The Inquisitorssssss' Manual is an inquiry into the difficult coexistence of self-affirmation and tenderness toward others. Their correct balance, which equals human dignity, occurs in the housekeeper.

Called "hallucinatory and lyrical" (Publishers Weekly), The Return of the Caravels -- selected as a New York times Summer Reading title -- is a powerful indictment of Portuguese colonialism and another literary tour de force from the pen of Antonio Lobo Antunes, "the greatest living Portuguese writer" (Vogue). It is set in Lisbon as Portugal's African colonies gain their independence in the mid-1970s. In a contemporary response to Camoes's conquest epic The Lusiads, Antunes imagines Vasco da Gama and other heroes of Portuguese explorations beached amid the detritus of the empire's collapse. Or is it the modern colonials -- with their mixed-race heritage and uneasy place in the "fatherland" -- who have somehow ended up in sixteenth-century Lisbon? As da Gama begins winning back ownership of Lisbon piece by piece in crooked card games, four hundred years of Portuguese history mingle -- the caravels dock next to Iraqi oil tankers, and the slave trade rubs shoulders with the duty-free shops. The Return of the Caravels is a startling and uncompromising look at one of Europe's great colonial powers, and how the era of conquest reshaped not just Portugal but the world. ..". the voice of Nabokov by way of Cortazar, Gogol by way of Dylan." -- Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Antunes has empathy for the contradictions of human feeling. He is a warm-bloodied writer."-- Michael Pye, The New York Times Book Review "[Antunes] deserves a wide audience of discerning readers." -- Michael Mewshaw, The Washington Post Book World

As the socialist revolution closes in, a once-wealthy Portuguese family is accused of economic sabotage. They must escape across the border to Spain, then on to Brazil -- but the family is bankrupt, financially and spiritually. The patriarch, Diogo, lies dying, while his rapacious offspring rifle through his belongings, searching for his will. He remembers with bitterness and resignation his foolish marriage to his brother's beautiful mistress, who left him with a mongoloid daughter and a simpleminded son, who at sixty is running toy trains past his father's deathbed with the solemn self-importance of a five-year-old. Told through a rippling overlay of voices, Act of the Damned circles closer and closer to the revelation of the diabolical immorality of Diogo's greedy son-in-law Rodrigo . . . who has fathered a child of his own bastard daughter and who is closing in on Diogo's crumbling estate. In the oppressive autumn heat, the characters' schemes ebb and flow in an atmosphere of decrepit elegance, tarnished silver, and rotting brocade. When the moment of departure finally arrives, the scene shifts from chaos to vacuum and Rodrigo finds himself no longer at the center of the group but firmly, terrifyingly, outside and alone.

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 (Exortacao aos Crocodilos) has won: - Best Novel by the Portuguese Writers Association (Grande Premio de Romance e Novela da Associacao Portuguesa de Escritores) (1999) - The D. Dinis Prize of the Casa de Mateus Foundation (Premio D. Dinis da Fundacao Casa de Mateus) (1999) - The Austrian State Literature Prize (Premio de Literatura Europeia do Estado Austriaco) (2000)

A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal's most celebrated writers Incapacitated after the removal of a malignant tumor, the narrator, Antonio, spends his days in a Lisbon hospital enduring the humiliations of severe illness. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he revisits fragments of his life and the people who passed through it. He recalls the village where he lived as a child near the Mondego River amid the eucalyptus and pines, his parents and grandparents and their tight-knit community of potato farmers and tungsten miners, and the woman he loved-an unexpected polyphony of voices and places sounding in sharp counterpoint to debilitating pain. By the Rivers of Babylon conjures the past and the present all at once, revealing the power of memory to embolden us in the face of extraordinary suffering. This is Antonio Lobo Antunes's homage to the beauty of a cherished life in its confrontation with imminent death.

Mas alla de la supuesta verdad de la precision historica, en este libro Lobo Antunes se vale del procedimiento borgiano de los B+anacronismos y las atribuciones erroneasB; . En un paisaje infernal, con reminiscencias del Luis Velez de Guevara de El diablo cojuelo o del Quevedo de los Suenos, los B+retornadosB; de Cfrica en 1975 se confunden, a traves de una epica inversa, con navegantes y colonizadores como el descubridor de Brasil, Pedro Clvares Cabral, o, en el paroxismo de la mezcla de epocas y oficios, con Cervantes y Oscar Wilde, entre otros. Maestro en desdibujar identidades, Lobo Antunes construye en Las naves una vision parodica que revela el otro lado de la exaltacion de los heroes de la patria y la inconsistencia de los movimientos mesianicos. La imagen de las naves alude no solo al doble movimiento de la expansion colonial y el regreso de los vencidos, sino tambien al topico literario de la navegacion de los muertos. Los vivos conviven con los heroes, fantasmas de un pasado ilusorio, despojados de virtudes y aureolas de santidad.

Este volumen recoge una seleccion de las mejores Cronicas que Antonio Lobo Antunes publico, desde 1993 y durante cinco anos, en el periodico portugues O Publico. Estas Cronicas constituyen un catalogo ejemplar de las obsesiones del autor, que los lectores de sus novelas identificaran facilmente: la infancia, la memoria, el amor, la soledad... Ubicadas en su Lisboa natal, nos ofrecen una vision del mundo directa y vivaz, menos hermetica y barroca. Bajo el prisma de la cotidianidad, la mirada del autor sigue siendo tan ironica y tierna como siempre. Un libro imprescindible para completar la imagen de un escritor que rehuye de todo estereotipo, y para comprender mejor su asombrosa obra poliedrica.

"En el culo del mundo," publicada por primera vez en portugues en 1979, tras el sorprendente exito que tuvo la primera novela "Memoria de elefante," permanecia inedita hasta ahora en castellano. Con esta traduccion se abre la posibilidad de conocer la primera etapa narrativa de Antonio Lobo Antunes.A lo largo del dialogo entre un hombre y una mujer, del que realmente solo escuchamos la voz masculina, la experiencia vivida por el protagonista en la guerra de Angola se va filtrando y expandiendo hasta absorber y condicionar todas las facetas de la relacion que ambos intentan establecer. Asi, la conciencia de la inmensa soledad y violencia que puede llegar a soportar el ser humano se revela como un factor determinante de la identidad individual y de la colectiva. Como telon de fondo, entre brumas, encontramos la presencia de un Portugal -del que Lisboa es sintesis y metafora- que no se comprende sin esta antinomia tragica de su historia colonial africana. Estructurada dualmente, tanto en lo que se refiere al desarrollo argumental como al tratamiento del tiempo y del espacio, En el culo del mundo es una novela imprescindible para comprender en su plenitud la geografia literaria de Lobo Antunes y un extraordinario texto literario de implacable andadura discursiva.

A novel the Los Angeles Times Book Review called "a work of poetic and erotic genius from a master navigator of the human psyche", The Natural Order of Things is a tale of two families and the secrets that bind them. The voices of his characters -- an army officer being tortured in prison on charges of conspiracy; an elderly man, once a miner in Mozambique, now reduced to dreams of "flying underground"; a diabetic teenage girl and the middle-aged husband she despises; the officer's illegitimate sister, locked away to haunt the house like Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre -- create a portrait of a disintegrating Portugal, a personal political history that attains the brilliance and surreality of Elias Canetti and Nikolai Gogol.

In the tradition of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the twentieth century s most original literary voices offers kaleidoscopic visions of a modern Portugal scarred by its Fascist past and its bloody colonial wars in Africa (Paris Review). Hailed as a masterpiece of world literature, The Land at the End of the World in an acclaimed translation by Margaret Jull Costa recounts the anguished tale of a Portuguese medic haunted by memories of war. Like the Ancient Mariner who will tell his tale to anyone who listens, the narrator s evening unfolds like a fever dream that is both tragic and haunting. The result is one of the great war novels of the modern age. "

The razor-thin line between reality and madness is transgressed in this Faulknerian masterpiece, Antonio Lobo Antunes's first novel to appear in English in five years. What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?, set in the steamy world of Lisbon's demimonde a nightclub milieu of scorching intensity and kaleidoscopic beauty, a baleful planet populated by drag queens, clowns, and drug addicts is narrated by Paolo, the son of Lisbon's most legendary transvestite, who searches for his own identity as he recalls the harrowing death of his father, Carlos; the life of Carlos's lover, Rui, a heroin addict and suicide; as well as the other denizens of this hallucinatory world. Psychologically penetrating, pregnant with literary symbolism, and deeply sympathetic in its depiction of society's dregs, Lobo Antunes's novel ventriloquizes the voices of the damned in a poetic masterwork that recalls Joyce's Ulysses with a dizzying farrago of urban images few readers will forget."

Antonio Lobo Antunes's sole ambition from the age of seven was to be a writer. Here, in The Fat Man and Infinity, "the heir to Conrad and Faulkner" (George Steiner) reflects on the fractured paradise of his childhood the world of prim, hypocritical, class-riven Lisbon in midcentury. His Proust-like memoirs, written over thirty years in chronicle form, pass through the filter of an adult who has known war and pain, and bear witness to the people whom he loved and who have gone into the dark. Stunningly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, in prose that glides like poetry, this is a modern-day chronicle of Portugal's imperfect past and arresting present, seen through the eyes of a master fiction writer, one on a short list to win a Nobel Prize. Readers particularly touched by Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes will be drawn to this journey into the heart of one of our greatest living writers."