An Explanation of the Birds: A Novel [Hardcover]

Antonio Lobo Antunes (Author), Richard Zenith (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1991

Rui S., a political historian, is unable to accept the circumstances of his life: his mother's death from cancer, his estrangement from his family, his rejection by his first wife and children, his political vacillations and his ambigious feelings for his second wife.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Portuguese author of Fado Alexandrino offers a dizzying, kaleidoscopic portrait of a weak-willed man destroyed by the bourgeois expectations of his wealthy family. During the course of the novel, Rui S. suffers a mental breakdown, and the distinctions between fact and fiction, between past, present and future, blur in Antunes's brilliant narration. Rui imagines his family as circus performers; ruthlessly stripped of their pretensions, they regard his own suicidal tendencies as worthy of ring-side attention. These surrealistic musings are contrasted to Rui's own pathetic history, which is presented in the form of cynical testimonials by his relatives. When his first marriage (to a woman of his own class) fails, Rui, a candidate for a doctorate in history, falls in love with and marries Marilia, a Communist, working-class professor of semiotics, even though his family, and later Rui himself, realize that this relationship, too, is destined to fail. Marilia tries to induct him into her Communist cell, but the other members scornfully reject Rui because of his background. His brief flirtation with radical politics ends when he is jailed and has to be bailed out by his industrialist father. Rui fails even at his attempt to end his second marriage. At the beach resort he's chosen for the denouement, Marilia turns the tables and announces that she intends to leave him. The disintegration of Rui's personality proceeds rapidly from this point, but not before Antunes has a chance to explore the uneasy social politics of Portugal.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A novel of dark, often bitter, humor and remembrance from Portuguese writer Antunes (Fado Alexandrino, 1990), whose hapless hero here represents all that's wrong with post-revolutionary Lisbon. Between a Thursday and a Sunday, Rui S.--a 33-year-old political historian and the son of a leading industrialist who has rebelled against his bourgeois family--recalls his unhappy past and anticipates a different future. Nothing has ever gone right for poor Rui. A failure in high school, expelled by the Communist Party for being too bourgeois, deserted by his first wife, and ignored by his second (a hard-line Communist and genuine member of the proletariat), Rui has only one happy memory to sustain him--talking about birds as a child with his father. And now that his mother is dying--while his philandering father is traveling as usual--Rui decides that he must somehow change his life, beginning with the upcoming weekend when he and his wife are away at a conference. At an appropriate moment he will tell her that he is going to leave her. Instead, the two end up at a run-down inn on the coast where the beach is home to hundreds of gulls--which, in turn, remind Rui of his one happy moment. Then, when his wife announces first that she's leaving him, Rui has no alternative but to do what he's already imagined. Surrounded by circling sea gulls, Rui ends his life--his one successful accomplishment. Antunes evokes a corrupt and dying world, infused with yearning for lost innocence, where even the food and weather are foul and where only suicide, however melodramatic, makes sense. A remarkable combination of angry satire and elegiac tenderness. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 261 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr (July 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802113397
• ISBN-13: 978-0802113399
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,800,159 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing tale of a squandered past and bleak future, February 29, 2000

By 

ian colford - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Explanation of the Birds (Antunes, Antonio Lobo) (Paperback)

As Rui S., 33 year old professor of political science and failed husband, son, and lover, looks back on his limited accomplishments, he contemplates his future and finds it particularly bleak. The son of a powerful and wealthy industrialist, Rui turned his back on the family business, studied the liberal arts, and joined the Communist Party. He married Tucha, a beautiful shrew, and fathered two children. We spend the entire book following a torrent of memories that washes over and around and through glimpses of the present. What distinguishes An Explanation of the Birds from other novels of its type is the manner of the telling. Past and present inter-mingle on the page with no markings or divisions acting as cues to the reader. Scenes from the past share space with scenes from the present within the same paragraph. It's a remarkable strategy that demands the reader remain ever attentive, but the effect is mesmerizing and works in a manner reminiscent of the magic realism of Garcia Marquez or Donoso. The novel is also cynically critical of modern Portugal, and of politics in general. Rui S. emerges as pathetic, his female companions as heartless, and his family as emotionally vapid and effete. Not a pretty picture. It is a novel worth reading for its brilliant technique, not necessarily for the warmth of its characterizations.

0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A ironic tale, April 23, 2002

By 

Pedro (V.N.Gaia Portugal) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Explanation of the Birds (Antunes, Antonio Lobo) (Paperback)

This is a ironic tale of a ordinay fellow on a particular situation. The life of Rui is a very ordinary one, divorced and married again, college professor, communist or maybe not, an ordinay wife. Rich son married with a communist lower-class wife. Now he tries to change this. Get a new life but how?