The Return of the Caravels (Antunes, Antonio Lobo) [Paperback]

Antonio Lobo Antunes (Author), Gregory Rabassa (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Antunes, Antonio Lobo | Publication Date: January 6, 2003

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

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Antunes examines the legacy of the Portuguese conquistadors in his latest novel, a murky, hallucinatory affair in which the author follows half a dozen characters through the breakup of Portugal's colonial dominion in the 1970s while occasionally backtracking to the 16th century to trace the effects of Vasco da Gama's journeys. Da Gama is by far Antunes's most intriguing creation, particularly when the author posits a scenario in which the explorer returns to 20th-century Portugal as the colonies are fading and proceeds to reestablish his power within the country by winning a series of high-stakes poker games. Antunes also delves into the fate of one of da Gama's admirals, Diogo Cao, who tries to raise money for a second voyage to India while engaging in an interlude with an elderly prostitute. None of the secondary figures measure up to the promise offered by those two characters, however, and Antunes fails to follow up on the intriguing plot line with da Gama. What he opts for instead is a lyrical but nonlinear narrative full of long, labyrinthine sentences in which he draws from the tradition of magical realism, using imagery ranging from the grotesque and lurid to the poetically beautiful to frame Portugal's loss of power. Antunes is definitely a writer worth reading for his literary talent and his insights into Portugal's history, geography and national character, but readers must be willing to leave behind any expectations regarding straight-line narrative and coherent plot.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This highly praised Portuguese author, who was trained as a psychiatrist and has been compared with Faulkner, C‚line, and Proust, characteristically writes about the decadence and corruption of contemporary Lisbon after the collapse of his tiny nation's world empire. In this phantasmagoric novel, Antunes conflates 400 years of history with the likes of a one-handed Spaniard named Cervantes just back from selling lottery tickets in Mozambique and Vasco da Gama, bored with tempestuous seafaring, pellagra, and venereal disease, challenging strangers to duels of blackjack in hopes of winning the entire nation with his luck at cards. The caravels of the Golden Age are moored beside Iraqi tankers outlined by the flames of steel mills as Castilian warships threaten to invade the realm. Written in 1988, this inventive novel is a romp through the vagaries of Portuguese history, a collage of anachronisms, and a satire of the greed and pettiness typical of the human condition. For all larger public libraries. Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (January 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802139558
• ISBN-13: 978-0802139559
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #904,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best writer on modern empire:Amazing but a bit arcane: worth the effort., August 6, 2011

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Susanna B Hecht "Jurua" (Topanga, California USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Return of the Caravels (Antunes, Antonio Lobo) (Paperback)

I am tremendous fan of of Antunes, and while the anglophone world thinks the realm of Portuguese speakers is some backwater, the next decade will show how important the lusophone empire has been as it become reanimated in Brazil's global projection. And perhaps Portugal is a useful aide memoire about empires in general, something the US might take to heart. For me Antunes is THE portuguese writer exactly because unlike the complex world of metaphor of Nobel winner Saramago, he tends to talk turkey and he binds the mythical to its far less noble manifestation in the current day.. The :"Inquistors handbook" for instance, which was about the inexpressible banality of evil under dictator Salazar doesn't diminish the suffering of its victims, merely highlights the mediocrity of the impulses of its modern day practitioners, which unlike the inquisitors of yore, lack even a purported moral object, merely the practice of habit. In a similar manner this conflation of the mythology of Portuguese empire and its modern manifestations does a tremendous job of describing the inanity of the transposed lives of heroes in the modern day through an amazing conflation of time. Readers unfamiliar with Vasco da Gama and the Lusiads as well as the extraordinary heroes of Portuguese exploration may be a bit sidelined ( although actually not so much--its more an enrichment than a requirement). What transpires here is the post "Odyssey" lives melded into the modern world. That the actually lives of heroes after their triumphs ends up embodied in their trunks of memoires and little else might serve well to remind the shock troops of today's empire how much they are really held in esteem as imperium tanks.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Expectations Dashed..., December 20, 2010

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John P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Return of the Caravels (Antunes, Antonio Lobo) (Paperback)

The dissolution of the Portuguese Empire. That is the central theme of Antonio Lobo Antunes' surrealistic novel. The novel is wryly titled; the caravels were highly maneuverable sailing ships which were used in the 15th and 16th centuries as a vehicle for exploration, trade, proselytization, and colonization. The missionary, Frances Xavier, reached as far as Japan in 1549. Along the way, the Portuguese flag was planted in various pieces of real estate, and flew for 400 or so years. Bits and pieces of the empire were lost in the post-World War II period, for example, Malacca and Goa, but the real ending came in 1974, with the "carnation revolution," and the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the home country. The new democratic government almost immediately declared the colonies independent. The colonists and assorted closely related natives "came home," often by ship, thus, metaphorically on the caravels. I had previously read Ryszard Kapuscinski's compelling journalistic account of the last days of colonial rule in Angola, entitled Another Day of Life, and felt the subject could be an excellent one for a novelist.

Antunes starts so well. He creates and develops an impressive array of characters, none of whom would be considered "heroic." Luis, in Angola, is attempting to bring his father, who was killed in a grenade attack, "home" to Portugal for burial. Worthy of the characters, including themselves, depicted in the works of VS and Shiva Naipaul, there is Francisco Xavier, an East Indian who got caught up in the Empire, once ran three movie houses in Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, and is now reduced to running the "Apostles of the Indies Boarding House" which caters to the flotsam of the empire as they return home. There is a couple who have lived in Guinea Bissau for 53 years, and are returning, essentially penniless, and have been invited to a "cat roast." There is Manoel de Sousa de Sepulveda, from Malanje, in northeastern Angola, who made his living from smuggled diamonds, is a pedophile, and now finds that his vacation flat in Portugal has been seized by the hoi polloi after the "socialist" revolution. There is Pedro Alvares Cabral (and others) who return with their mulatto wives, and support themselves by turning their wives out to be prostitutes.

And there is no question Antunes can turn a unique phrase. In describing the Angolan rebels seizing power, he say they were "...drunk from cups of aftershave and authority." Or: "...the chandelier prisms that were sailors from an abortive mutiny hanged from the rigging, plucked clean by seagulls and Atlantic kites." Or: "...by the cirrhosis of the fluorescent lighting leaned over me like a weary pieta and I order a quart of club soda where the bubbles leaped up from the bottom like insect eggs..." Or: "...the forty-year-old vagrant women who would visit the bar, slippered and funereal, to impose the dew of their groins on men too drunk to be interested in their chimerical services..."

I'm a big fan of both Joyce and Pynchon, to name a couple who have labored in the stream-of-consciousness field, as well as the "magic realism" of Marquez, but about half way through the book, despite the very promising beginning, and with so much potential, in terms of characters, the book seemed to fall off a cliff into the hallucinatory ramblings of William Burroughs in, among others, Naked Lunch At some level, the juxtaposition of characters throughout history, like Vasco de Gama anchored besides Saudi tankers, has to "work"; at least provide some sort of insight, and in that endeavor I believe Antunes failed. There must be some meaning in all the prose, and the lack of authenticity, such as "French shillings," and "schools of octopus" can be grating.

This is my first work of Antunes, and I was cautioned not to commence with it, or I might not continue reading him; advice I should have respected. I understand The Fat Man and Infinity: And Other Writings is much better, and will continue to read Antunes, but for this effort I can only muster 3-stars.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The sheer sleaziness of it all, November 4, 2010

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R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Return of the Caravels (Antunes, Antonio Lobo) (Paperback)

The caravel was the workhorse vessel of the Portuguese during the Age of Discovery. Originally designed for ocean-going fishing, it was adapted by the Portuguese for carrying cargo. For its time, the caravel was speedy and maneuverable, particularly suited to beat against contrary winds and evade attacks from hostile ships. In Portuguese national mythology, the caravel has a special place as the emblematic vehicle by which Portugal spread its overseas empire.

THE RETURN OF THE CARAVELS is nominally set in 1974, as the last vestiges of that empire crumbled and colonialists, or their descendants, scrambled to escape Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea (today, Guinea-Bissau). But the novel actually spans the entire history of the Portuguese Empire, going back to the days - and including the characters - of Prince Henry, Diego Căo, and Vasco de Gama. The late 15th Century is juxtaposed with the late 20th Century, the caravels with Turkish freighters, the explorers with the exploiters - all in one phantasmagoric stewpot. There is no linear story line. Rather, the narrative keeps veering back and forth among centuries, between Lisbon and various colonies, among characters, and even between the first and the third person - sometimes all within the same paragraph, even the same sentence. The novel is populated with adventurers, opportunists, whores, pimps, charlatans, dreamers, louts, saps, rogues, and roués. There is not an ounce of nobility or grandeur. Everything everywhere is lurid and squalid.

Somewhere I read that this was one of Lobo Antunes's most "accessible" novels. If that's the case, it doesn't bode well for me and the rest of his oeuvre. THE RETURN OF THE CARAVELS is tough going. It exemplifies something else I read - namely, that trying to get into one of Lobo Antunes's novels is like trying to board a freight train moving at full speed. One of the back-cover blurbs says that Lobo Antunes is an "heir to the narrative collage technique championed" by the likes of Celine, Faulkner, García Marquez, Joyce, Nabokov, Pynchon, and Calvino. I am not really qualified to endorse or to dispute that statement, but I will say that for me THE RETURN OF THE CARAVELS was more difficult to follow than was any of my readings of any of those authors. No doubt comprehension would have been easier were I more familiar with the history of Portugal and the geography of it and its empire. (Annotations would have been helpful, but they probably would have to have numbered in the hundreds.) But even so, the novel is densely written, as if - deliberately -- to defy understanding and leave you just shaking your head at the sheer sleaziness of it all.