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Antonio Lobo Antunes

The Land at the End of the World: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, May 23, 2011

by António Lobo Antunes (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

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One of the twentieth century's most original literary voices delivers a haunting and heartrending meditation on the absurdities of love and war.

Considered to be António Lobo Antunes's masterpiece, The Land at the End of the World--now in a new and fully restored translation by acclaimed translator Margaret Jull Costa--recounts the anguished tale of a Portuguese medic haunted by memories of war, who, like the Ancient Mariner, will tell his tale to anyone who listens. In the tradition of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, Lobo Antunes weaves words into an exhilarating tapestry, imbuing his prose with the grace and resonance of poetry. The narrator, freshly returned to Lisbon after his hellish tour of duty in Angola, confesses the traumas of his memory to a nameless lover. Their evening unfolds like a fever dream, as Lobo Antunes leaps deftly back and forth from descriptions of postdictatorship Portugal to the bizarre and brutal world of life on the front line. The result is both tragic and absurd, and belongs among the great war novels of the modern age.

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

May 23, 2011
Dimensions

6 x 0.9 x 8.6 inches
ISBN-10

0393077764
ISBN-13

978-0393077766
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[Antunes] has created a memorably unhinged narrator, and [Costa] manages to capture, perfectly and faithfully, the bitter, hallucinatory and increasingly desperate tone of his monologue."
― Larry Rohter, New York Times

"Lobo Antunes crafts macabre fever dreams as if possessed by an abler Poe, and few other novelists have his Bellovian ability to see both deeply and minutely, to render the world, the fallen world, as if never rendered before."
― William Giraldi, Daily Beast

"Read António Lobo Antunes' The Land at the End of the World, and you, like the protagonist, may never forget the hallucinatory depravity, degradation and corruption of an unjust war."
― Kai Maristed, Los Angeles Times

"Magnificent prose, dense with striking and unexpected imagery…I was so seized by the novel's spirit that I was motivated to turn to my own. I wanted to imitate Lobo Antunes, and I failed."
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

About the Author

António Lobo Antunes, born in 1942 in Benfica, is considered to be Portugal's greatest living writer. The author of more than twenty novels, including What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?, he has won many awards and makes his home in Lisbon.

For her translations of Spanish and Portuguese, Margaret Jull Costa has won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize four times as well as the Premio Valle-Inclán, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the 2008 PEN Prize for best translation from any language for The Maias, by Eça de Queirós (New Directions, 2007).

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st Edition (May 23, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393077764
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393077766
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.9 x 8.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,066,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #118,063 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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33 ratings

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Martin Zook

The Grim and Poisonous Space/Time of War

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 17, 2011

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Antonio Lobo Antunes' The Land at the End of the World, hands down, is one of the better books I've read this year - and it has been an excellent reading year. WARNING: it isn't for everyone, or even a wide swath of the reading universe. For instance, it has taken days to rework this review because the software that combs through review finds much of the writing objectionable.

The 217-page narrative during a day of an army medic just returned from Portugal's colonial war in Angola after more than two years. The entire narrative is the medic's recounting of his perspective of the war. But from the narrative of his own experience, he expands the story to critically examine the insanity of the post colonial war and armed conflicts in general. War affects and corrupts not just the country hosting the battles, but also the invading country.

War permeates every aspect of the narrator's life, but also Angolan and Portuguese societies. No one and nothing is immune.

Each of the short chapters is a carefully crafted recounting how specific aspects of the narrator's life and society are corrupted. And each chapter ends with a little twist such as this from a short chapter describing how his perspective shifts when he is able to view himself from outside his body: "And at the end of a painful illness borne with Christian resignation and consoled by the sacraments of Our Holy Mother Church, I would take my place in the pantheon of my grandmother's missal, joining that extensive gallery of kindly bores, and be offered up as an example to my indifferent grand children, who would view my absurdly tepid existence with rage."

Time in this narrative is not linear. It's spatial. And I would think that would jolt many readers out of their traditional narrative comfort zone. Within each chapter time/space is expanded to link Portugal and Angola, the personal and the historical, and the doctor and historical figures. In each chapter, as time/space expands, it also spirals in on itself, like water going down a drain, until it all is sucked into the underlying "moral" of each chapter. So, for instance, the reader discovers events such as the narrator's divorce only when he describes being alone in an apartment in Portugal that "they" visit. They are his ex wife and his daughter.

Scenes shift back and forth without warning, as a result of the spatial structure. Antunes links the "fictional" narrative with the real world by weaving in historical figures, not just of Portugal, but of the world at large.
There is much talk about the Antunes mastery of language and that can't be overstated. But it's the structure he builds with the language that struck me, half blind that I am.

Any future lists of books about war that I compile will include The Land at the End of the World on it.

6 people found this helpful

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Violent, disjointed and pure genius - I loved this book!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 9, 2012

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This Portuguese writer wrote this book in 1979 after his stint as a doctor in Angola. Obviously this war had a deep and lasting impression on him. His writing is violent and disjointed and told through the eyes of a former soldier suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome. He uses lots of descriptive metaphors in an extremely creative way and gives the reader non-linear layers of information regarding the suffering of the soldiers in general and himself in particular. There is a sense of injustice of it all as he lets the words flow, beautiful sensual language that kept my eyes glued to the page and hurled me right into his strange and tumultuous world of someone who has seen all and will never stop suffering the effects of his experience.

The book goes back and forth with little snippets of information that build into a modernistic portrait of misery. His use of words is pure genius. This is clearly the most creative and moving book I have ever read. I loved it and will never forget it. It was the selection of the international reading group at my local bookstore which often introduces me to books I would never hear about otherwise and I really appreciate the opportunity learn about this author and experience his unique voice and world view.

2 people found this helpful

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Ferg

Difficult Reading

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 7, 2020

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It was impossible for me to grasp the plot or storyline presented by this author. The difficulty I had were the long strings of run-on, abstract, descriptive text. For example he could describe a lamp in ornate detail, spin off into a description of one item found on the lamp, spin off again on description of a car that resembled an item described in the secondary lamp descriptor, then spin off in to a soliloquy on a sexual encounter had as an anteater. In the end, I would have no concept of why he was in the room that held lamp. This went on through first 4 chapters I read. The author is masterful in his use of words to create imaginative descriptions of the most ordinary. I wanted to appreciate the vision he held for his narrative, but after several attempts at reading the text, I always felt uninformed and unaware.

3 people found this helpful

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kmbs

Read it twice and will re-read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 13, 2017

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One of the finest books i have read. Poetic imagery that startles and at times does not make sense. Just keep reading and it will. Beautiful langauge for a horrible war. The boredom, the fear, the horror, the anger at those who sent them there, the impossibility of returning to a normal life all comes out in this first-person dialogue with a women he is trying to seduce. So much more striking than the non-fiction, personal account of other wars which i have read

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Ragnhild Munck, Author & Storyteller

an eyeopener

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2013

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This is about the horrors young people are introduced to when they go to war. This is a raw, merciless account from one man, who is ready to reveal all.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 13, 2014

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This is truly a gifted writer. His writing is very poetic in style and a joy to read. Great story.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 5, 2017

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wonderful writing !

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Angus Jenkinson

a modern literary classic of war and its devastating human effects

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 3, 2011

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In the beautifully translated slim volume of Antonio Lobo Antunes', The Land at the End of the World, an indictment of war, I feel have discovered a new country of immense power and sad beauty. It is not just the country in which the story is set, the benighted land of Angola and its colonial war, about which this ruined remnant of a doctor pours forth his feelings. No, it is the writing and the vivid intelligence that excludes from every sentence.

Antunes has been compared to Faulkner, Proust, Joyce, Cormac McCarthy, Malcolm Lowry, and I would add Conrad and Herman Melville. To be hailed in such circles implies a great writer, and Antunes does not disappoint. Moreover, as another critic observed, anyone compared so diversely must be an original voice. This immensely rich novel is a single heartfelt bitter poetic monologue by a former doctor in the Portuguese army whose life has been poisoned by the experience of the colonial war in Angola. It is an outpouring of rancour and pain and wisdom and yearning for love to an unknown woman met in a bar, rather as the Ancient Mariner seizes on the guests at the wedding party.

The story begins in media res, the doctor already in full flight, and proceeds via the lush language of the novel to evoke the rank emptiness and horror of the war, and consequential failed marriage, wasted life and unsuccessful sexual communion with the woman.

But one reads it for the extraordinary language. Take a sentence (at complete random): "Have you ever noticed how at this hour of the night and with the amount of alcohol in your blood, the body begins to emancipate itself from you, refusing to light your cigarette, grasping your glasses with a certain tactile clumsiness, wondering about inside your clothes with a certain gelatinous fluidity?" (P 58). Sometimes, a single sentence might stretch over several pages, wandering between past memories and present moments, digressions and descriptions, wisdom and bafflement, like the lost, haunted soul who speaks them. As a reader, as a reader one hesitates between delicious enjoyment of the language and sorrow in the in the rank and awful horrors that is mankind in stupid war.

The first English edition hardback is a handsome collectable volume, enjoying high-quality paper with rough hand finished edges.

5 people found this helpful

William Jordan

experiences of Portugal's war in Angola - and a unique narrative voice

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 23, 2011

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A doctor who has seen military service in Portugal's was in Angola recollects his experiences there (and to some extent both more recent events and those of his childhood).

Lobo Antunes writing (as translated and I assume in Portuguese) comes in long setences full of unexpected twists, turns, metaphors, similes. To give one shortened example from the second page: "The zoo's restaurant - was usually full, in equal quantities, of parties of day-trippers and impatient mothers, who shooed away with their forks balloons that drifted about like absentminded smiles trailing bits of twine behind them, like a Chagall bride trailing the hem of her dress".

If you are up for this - and I found it rewarding and possible to read through it to the content - it's a compelling read about an unforgettable set of experiences so traumatic that the narrator cannot successfully resume life in Lisbon...

I would strongly recommend this.

5 people found this helpful

muriel

Beautifully written. The english translation is very good but ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 9, 2014

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Beautifully written. The english translation is very good but still it is shame i cannot read it in portuguese. A man entangled in a war he does not understand tells his story.

One person found this helpful

Interested customer X

Amazing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 4, 2015

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I'm still reading the book and so far I've loved it. It's a really hard and complicated read, must be read slowly taking a lot of thought of what is being said. Even though it's been really well translated into English, anyone who does understand the context is likely to struggle. Still never came across anything like it.

Pata Alves

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 21, 2016

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Horrible book. Great for colonial and post-colonial studies.

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