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 by the betrayal of the Portuguese government, consisting 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.
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“Natives” and “exotics,” terms often used to describe the relationship of plants to their environments, also refers, in this novel, to the characters who populate it, since all of the main characters live in foreign environments which have their own native populations. The Forder family, in the first of three major story lines, is on assignment in Ecuador in 1970, where the father works for the US State Department. In the second section, which takes place in 1929, Violet Clarence (Rosalind Forder’s mother) is living in the bush in Australia, helping clear the land to build a home in the bush. Part III follows a distant relative, a Mr. Clarence, who in 1822 lives in Scotland, though he is not Scottish. He and his foster son George emigrate to St. Michael in the Portuguese Azores. In each of these three story lines, the “exotic,” foreign residents permanently affect the environments in which they live. Alison clearly believes that despoiling a natural environment by removing or adding new plants and/or animals is both dangerous and foolish, no matter how honorable the motives might be.
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In what may be Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s most playful—and, perhaps, popular—novel, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a secondary school history teacher, views a film given to him by a colleague and discovers in the film an actor who looks exactly like him in every respect. Though the film was made five years before and the actor was wearing a mustache, the two men are identical otherwise. Tertuliano, a somewhat gloomy, divorced man, has always liked the routine of his solitary life, and though he is a daydreamer, he has never before acted on those dreams. When he sees his double, he is stunned. “One of us is a mistake,” he declares, and as he begins, typically, to overanalyze the situation and chat with himself about the fact that “never before in the history of humanity have two identical people existed in the same place and time,” he finds himself wondering what it would be like to find and meet this double.
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