The Land at the End of the World: A Novel

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.

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.

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

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.

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

wonderful writing !

Antonio Lobo Antunes's first novel to be translated into English, "The Land At the End of the World," is a one-of-a-kind reading experience. It is a 217 page descent into the depravity of war. A fictionalized memoir of Antunes's 27 month national service duty in Portugal's ill-fated colonial war in Angola, "Land" reads like a never-ending nightmare. Antunes wrote this as a moving testament to the 1.5 million young Portuguese men and women who served in a war nobody neither understood nor wanted.The narrator unleashes his tale of delirious horror to a woman at a bar, hoping to seduce her for the night. What transpires is a hallucinogenic ramble that never seems to end. The doctor's vivid memories and disturbing visions conjure up a Bosch painting. The narrator's subconscious vomits forth childhood memories, horrific war scenes, and bile-filled rants against parents, priests, and dictator Salazar.Antunes, like Serbo-Hungarian master stylist, Danilo Kis, weaves metaphor after delectable metaphor into every sentence. Nuanced, exquisitely etched description fills out each page. Forget about linear plot or engaging dialogue, "The Land" rambles on as a tortured monologue, a punctured consciousness bleeding without stop.The doctor's external hell is outdone by his internal tortures. He simply didn't do enough to stem, stop or even alleviate the insanity that was his 1,001 day sentence in Angola. Young and clueless conscripts, riddled with bullets, mutilated by shrapnel, truncated by land-mines come to him for salvation. Yet, he could have done more to stop the madness. "I never gave them a cry of revolt, a refusal to submit to the gentlemen running the war in Lisbon."He berates his family, his privileged upbringing, and most of all his tyrannical government for letting things disintegrate to this point. His beloved Portugal suffocates at the hands of power-hungry sycophants and dead-souled masses who quiver and beg before the Jesuits, Salazar and the infamous secret police, the PIDE. He and the other unfortunate conscripts were "...the involuntary occupiers of a foreign land, the agents of a provincial form of fascism that was corroding and eating away at itself with the slow acid of its own sad, parochial stupidity." To the nudniks and vain morons running Portugal's 'empire,' "Angola was a pink rectangle on a primary school map, black nuns beaming out from a missionary calendar, women with rings through their noses."For the doctor and the other young men trapped there, Angola and her pointless war have dissolved into a wicked brew of brutality, horror and beauty all twisted together. The images haunt, disconcert, scar. "Three or four prisoners dug their own graves, then hunched down inside them, closed their eyes tight, and when the bullet was fired, crumpled the way a soufflé collapses, a red flower of blood opening its petals on their heads."Antunes writes with a poet's virtuosity, a seer's vision. The cafes of Luanda are "...cheap restaurants that resembled railroad station buffets, where the food tastes of coal and sheets damp with the sad mucus of farewells." And sex acquires prehistoric parameters. "We will come together like two great Tertiery-age monsters, bristling with cartilage and bones bleating out the onomatopoeic groans of vast lizards." The guilty conscience transforms into "... a kind of remorse that makes me curl up in one corner of my room like a hunted animal, white with shame and fear, waiting, my mouth resting on my knees, for a morning that never comes."Those readers willing to immerse themselves in another's nightmares will understand this masterpiece. Those who cherish language twisted, contorted and kneaded into something breathtaking (thanks to Margaret Costa's superb translation) will be awed by Antunes's vivid poetic imagery. "Perhaps the war has helped to make me the person I am today whom I deep down reject: a melancholic bachelor whom no one phones and from whom no one expects a call, who coughs occasionally just to feel as if he had company, and whom the cleaning lady will find one day sitting in his rocking chair in his undershirt, mouth agape, his purple fingers trailing on the November-colored hair of the carpet."

This is a wonderful novel, so full of rage and disgust at a repressive government and its pointless colonial war in Africa, coupled with the most beautiful tenderness of awareness of self and humanity that it made me weep. That's not to say that there isn't self disgust but it's shown in the most wonderful poetical way that it is luminous, true and therefore beautiful. A baptism of fire. I loved this book. If it was up to me this author would have won the Nobel prize and not Saramago.

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.

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.

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

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.