Customer Reviews

Fado Alexandrino

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Secker published a couple of Antunes' books in the UK in the late eighties, but then they dropped him. On a trip to the US I found Fado Alexandrino. I was astonished. It is rare that you come across an experimental novel which is a page turner too. It is the story of a handful of army vets who have a reunion. The narrative weaves from one man's disturbed thoughts to the next man's. This creates a confusion in who is speaking, but - like I say - this is not off putting: it adds to the effect of the novel. The book looks daunting, but I unreservedly recommend it. It is moving. It is well written. It is thought provoking. Antunes is a devastating writer.

Late one night in Lisbon, Portugal, five army men are reunited on the tenth anniversary of their battalion's return from Mozambique. Since the horror of Africa, some of the men have been promoted, some divorced, married, remarried, demoted, fired, started a business, looked after family members, buried family members. They discuss their lives over wine, tongues loosening as the alcohol flows. In a few hours, one of the men will be dead, murdered, stabbed in the back by one of the other soldiers.

To boil down the plot to its very essence, the above paragraph encapsulates Fado Alexandrino. But this sprawling, extravagant, difficult novel covers so much more with every one of its nearly five hundred pages. The impact of this novel is not what is said, but how it is said, the way Antunes manages to weave five very different lives together into a coherent whole, spanning more than a decade of time.

Antunes uses an interesting style of extremely long paragraphs, broken up by the very rare period, but littered with commas. In one paragraph - this is not rare - a character will begin thinking about something, his thoughts triggered by an off-hand comment, and his mind will wander back to five years ago, or ten, or yesterday, and the focus of the paragraph will switch to this new scene, with new characters, without changing tense, staying in the 'present', and then another character will begin thinking, and they will take over the scene, they will direct the paragraph to another place and time, they will be the focus. This happens again and again, we constantly change from early times, when the soldiers were young and inexperienced, to the moderate years, with wives and children, unhappy or not, to the 'present', the reunion, when some are old and some are older, but all are weary in their own way. Yet somehow it works. It is a testament to Antunes literary skill that we are never completely lost, that there is always a thread to hold the path, that even with rapid, unflagged changes of point-of-view character, or scene, of time, of focus, we can stay on par with the course and understand what is happening. A good example of this shifting focus: What sad pusses dead people have, the soldier thought, what soft rubbery mouths, like a sick clown's, and their hands, Captain, so quiet like that, hanging down, pale, whether it was from the vitamin pills or the ampules, I was soon able to stand on my pins and shuffle along from room to room without any help, the day after tomorrow the little man with the briefcase will dump the furniture into the street and take over the house, the day after tomorrow, the soldier thought, they're going to kill my uncle for good, Odete stopped visiting me, waving, smiling, I'm fine, he remember Olavo in the apartment in Cova da Piedade, newspaper open on his knees, staring at him a little unwillingly with furtive eyes that tried unsuccessfully to congratulate themselves, to be happy, the ferry shaking and leaping on the waves, the trip of the truck to the town, the following day, in the afternoon, he got dressed and sneaked out of the buildings while the concierge went to pay the electric bill, he walked two or three... And so on, and so on, and so on. This paragraph continues on for another page.

The primary reason that all this works is because of the Revolution, a turbulent time in Portugal's history, when socialism and communism threatened to take over, when violence, raping and slaughter were commonplace. The novel is split into three section, Before the Revolution, During the Revolution, and After the Revolution. Generally, when jumping around, we are able to tell what is happening because of this time, this character, this situation's proximity to the horrible events in Lisbon. Granted, although the time can change so sudden and dramatically, during the 'Before the Revolution' section, most of the jumping is contained to a time that is before the Revolution, and the same with the other two sections. It is almost as though the primary character of the novel is the Revolution itself, a great maelstrom that sucks in the five soldiers, twisting and turning their lives about.

Antunes has a fantastic sense of imagery, an ability to describe situations and localities unlike anyone else I have experienced. He is very organic with his descriptions, a woman's mouth is 'an orange pulp', her thighs open 'like a marine polyp', and so on. Considering that the focus of the novel is the Revolution and its terrible, deleterious effects upon the nation of Portugal and, in particular, the city of Lisbon, the themes of death and decay are primary in the writing. So that in the daytime, with the sun cruelly exposing the mends, the filth, the lack of paint, and the sores of poverty that the lights disguised, everything seemed smaller, uglier, very depressing, and desolately poor. Unfortunately, this diseased, dirty quality of the writing - so effective when portraying a nation gone to rot - is difficult to read when referencing women. There is not a single positive female character in Antune's Lisbon, they are all selfish, or vapid, or dirty, or rotting, or old, or meek, or domineering, or... the list continues. However, it can be argued - quite correctly, I believe - that these negative qualities are not inherent in women so much as a part of the perception that the soldiers carry within themselves. In Mozambique, they were accustomed to raping and prostitution - male or female - and it is easy to imagine that they would have gained a low opinion of females and sex because of this.

There is one misstep in this book, and it is worthy of mention. The second to last chapter is the only chapter that completely focuses in upon one character, and is the only chapter where the narrator is a woman. The chapter is reminiscent of Molly's soliloquy, as in Joyce's Ulysses, with huge run-on sentences that take up an entire paragraph, long, detailed descriptions of sex and lust, wandering thoughts and ideas, etc. The chapter is written with fantastic skill, but the problem is that it does not really fit the rest of the novel. The tone is different, the pacing is different, the style is different, and it didn't seem to serve much point. Yet, it was an enjoyable read. An interesting dilemma.

By the end of this dense, difficult novel, there was a sense of relief that it was over, a feeling of accomplishment. However, there was loss, because, with Fado Alexandrino, I was able to fall into a decadent, violent world so completely that getting out again was a difficulty, and this is a rarity in a novel. The effect was powerful, almost physically so while reading, and I would recommend to no person reading two Antunes' novels in a row. Beautiful, morbid, complex, difficult, structurally amazing and intricately detailed, Fado Alexandrino is well worth the effort.

I just re-read the Amazon description: dense and demanding. That's an understatement! I really enjoy Portuguese and Latin American literature (you know a "but" is coming), BUT why, why, why do the writers not want you to get to know who the characters are until page 17,348? It isn't that the characters aren't important to the story - they ARE the story.

Each of these should come with a disclaimer: "WARNING: you may never know who the characters are or what they are talking about. This is not a fault of your brain or the printer. It is doubtful it is part of a plot to take over the world since they wouldn't know who to put in charge or where to find them if they did. Read at your own risk." Don't be surprised if the warning is written by the author.

If you are patient, you will eventually identify and identify with the characters and the events they are describing. Once you get to that point, the flow of the story will change for you and what went before will be clearer (you'll never be totally clear - Antunes probably planned it that way).

This is one of those books being referred to when you hear "it has to be experienced".

Drowning in words that crash, rumble, streak past, drip down through the cracks in the ceiling, swell up from the pages and invade my brain, stumble, drop, fall, plunge from every page, topple my usual sense of books, I made it through FADO ALEXANDRINO to the very end, sometimes wondering why I was subjecting myself to such a difficult novel, sometimes rejoicing that I'd heard of it by chance many years ago. Lobo Antunes, whose other works I don't know, has written a nearly-500 page masterpiece which definitely is not for everyone. It demands close attention, it demands patience, and you have to like the flow of language. That this is the case even in English is a tribute to the famous translator Gregory Rabassa, who almost single-handedly, brilliantly, has brought Portuguese-language literature to English readers. Five men gather in the 1980s in a bar. They served together in Mozambique around 1970, fighting in one of Salazarist Portugal's colonial wars. The novel covers their return to Lisbon, the resumption or crumbling of their previous lives, and then the onset of the bloodless Portuguese revolution of April 25, 1974. One man never speaks, but we feel his presence. There's a soldier, become a furniture mover for his uncle's tottering business. There's a second lieutenant from a humble background, married into a rich family who flee to Brazil when the Revolution occurs. Third is a lieutenant colonel whose wife dies just as he returns from Africa and who takes up with "a cloud of perfume" in silver high heels and oyster-colored eyelids. Fourth is a communications officer (also referred to as "Lieutenant" which caused me no end of confusion at first) an underground Communist agitator, jailed for his pains before being freed after April 25th. What happens to the men during that confused period in Portugal's history, and then when things settle down is the subject of the rest of the book. There's a lot of their sex life, a murder and a denouement. Set down like that, the `plot' of FADO ALEXANDRINO doesn't amount to much. No, you'll read this because you want to read a highly unusual work of art, one that weaves stories, the gritty side of Lisbon, times, voices, dreams, thoughts, imaginations, and moments together like a collage, like a Pollock painting, like a tapestry. Lobo Antunes changes direction on pages, in paragraphs, and even in sentences---some of which are extremely long. He draws a detailed picture of Portuguese society seen from the bottom up; no touristy views for him. You can't just skim along; you have to pay close attention.

Let's face it. Either you're going to be blown away by this incredible book or you're going to toss it after the first 20 pages.

Fado Alexandrino makes Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo appear happy-go-lucky, Samuel Beckett, in comparison, a court jester. Antonio Lobo Antunes has an incredible capacity to write despair into every line. That he remains amongst the living is an achievement in itself - one can only assume he possesses an amazingly developed black humour and an incredible capacity to turn anxiety into a black joke.

The second lieutenant in Fado Alexandrino is a masterpiece.

When will Antonio Lobo Antunes receive the Nobel Prize for Literature? Or is he to remain like Vargas Llosa and Graham Greene amongst those eminently worthy but perpetually overlooked?

I agree with those who admire the style - it is veryy different, but once you're into it, it's easy & even fun to follow. In fact, "normal" styles seem a little boring. However, I found the book to be pretty depressing in general - you wonder how these guys can all be such a mess!

This book is a amazing voyage to the most deepest places of the mind. Here you live, and on this book you will really live, the life after the african colonial war of four portuguese veteran. Their most inner desires, feelings and thoughts are exposed in a really vivid picture. You almost see them in a Lisbon City long lost.