Antonio Lobo Antunes–THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Posted in 1-2011 Reviews, Angola, Historical, Literary, Portugal, Social and Political Issues on Jun 17th, 2011
In this high-temperature fever dream of a novel, with images that boil and explode with emotional intensity, author Antonio Lobo Antunes describes the life of a newly graduated Lisbon physician who has been sent to Angola from 1971 – 1973, during Portugal’s war to preserve its colonies. As the novel begins, six years have passed since the speaker has returned to Lisbon from Angola, but the young physician still cannot come to grips with all he saw and felt there. Furious at the betrayal of the Portuguese government of the ultra-right wing Estado Novo, led for many years by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the speaker accuses that government of responsibility for all the African dead and all the Portuguese lost souls who had to fight that senseless war. After bedding a woman he has just met, he is suddenly impelled to talk about his experiences in Angola, and, once started, he cannot stop. The intensity of the feelings and images throughout this book belie the usual objectivity of a novelist. Like his speaker, the author, too, was a young physician when he was sent to perform military service in Angola from 1971 – 1973, and though this is considered a novel, it is obviously extremely autobiographical.
