The Inquisitors' Manual

The most concrete and accessible of Antonio Lobo Antunes’ books I’ve read so far, and certainly the one I would recommend most to someone looking for an entry point to his work. The Inquisitors’ Manual is still very much in his style – it is less hallucinatory and surreal than some of his other efforts, but he is writing a world where present and past are intermingled and it’s difficult to grasp hold of what’s real (or at least what’s accurate). He plays with perspective, telling you the same story through the eyes of two or three unreliable narrators, shedding new light on various incidents and personalities in the lives of the now-former minister Francisco, his children Joao and Paula, his lovers, his staff and his victims but also forcing the reader to question what really happened, who is really to believed and what prejudices and agendas those storytellers bring to the table. It’s intellectually interesting and thematically appropriate for a novel examining the impact of totalitarianism on Portugal, a country where for decades the truth was what those with power said it was and its value was diminished according.Lobo Antunes is, much like in Return of the Caravels, getting into the lives of history’s winners-turned-losers – in this case those empowered by the dictatorship now forced to survive in a world after the Carnation Revolution. While he is certainly critical of what the people’s coup left behind, highlighting in various ways both its injustices against those associated with the regime who didn’t actually benefit from it and the experience of all those ordinary Portuguese who did not find the paradise that was promised in its wake, he starkly illustrates the cost of totalitarianism on the human soul.In Joao’s wife and in-laws we see how it has fed on and bred more of and intermingled with racism, imperialism, elitism and a particularly sharp brand of classism.In our central character Francisco we see how the impunity enjoyed by those in the elite ranks of the dictatorship creates human monsters, in this case a man infected by machismo who simply cannot grasp that there are things his power cannot bring him; who abuses and unleashes violence on almost everyone in his path to fill the hole left by a wife who never loved him and seems to have felt somewhat coerced into marrying him (or just according to his whim); and who treats people as playthings. He cannot see his own failings or accept his losses for being too used to being able to manipulate and influence everything and everyone around him, and is unable to adjust to life without those tools.In virtually all of our cast we see a society inalterably stained not just by violence and oppression but by a frankly depressing callousness. The Portugal the Salazar regime left behind seems to be filled with people with nothing but contempt for their fellow human beings, even their family members and loved ones. They are entirely self-interested, relating to those around them by the value they can provide in their own lives – it’s a world defined by strict hierarchies based on power relationships, where everyone only feels better with the ability to lash out at someone in the strata below them. There is no sense of higher purpose or values, little trust or loyalty, little love, little decency. Our good-hearted characters inevitably end up on the short end for believing such things, discovering that kindness will be treated as weakness, and those who reach out for real connection end up not merely disappointed but scarred for it.After years in which a sense of stability or dignity was impossible and a sense of security tied to your power within the regime or your ability to tap some of that power, those in Lobo Antunes’ post-coup Portugal cannot seem to find any of these when they need to, nor are they hopeful that their futures will be brighter. It’s an unremittingly dark world, and even Francisco’s attempt to provide a grace note in his final testament fails to successfully light a match to alleviate it – not only can he not even think of Joao without excoriating him, not only can he not quite manage to say he loves him, he has made it clear over the last 400 pages that he has no understanding of what precisely love is beyond services provided in exchange for a measure of control over someone’s life.Lobo Antunes also paints a harsh picture of the indignities of aging and infirmity, how it wipes away your individual identity and how those going through it come to terms with it – or avoid doing so.A good starter novel for those looking to see what this highly-regarded writer is about.

Excellent!

This was the first Lobo Antunes book I ever finished with enthusiasm. Since then I have been a devouted fan. I had tried to read Lobo Antunes at various stages in my life, unsuccessfully before this book. As a young man I had trouble finding his nuanced and detailed psychological profiles of characters in life dramas a bit too tedious - at an age when I wanted stories with big life drama. Later I tried to begin at the beginning, with Memoria de Elefante and Os Cus de Judas and was put off by the thinly disguised autobiographical component - both novels seemed like slightly self indulgent monologues by alter egos of the author written out of vanity or I don't know what. At the time I was also put off by ALA's personal life - his talent for divorce, his catfight with Saramago, etc. Regarding the Saramago rivalry I realize in hindsight that it was in part fabricated or at least greatly exaggerated and encouraged by the Portuguese media, but at the time I was "high" on Saramago's books and couldn't find time to read ALA. Then I found The Inquisitor's Manual, and it was an extraordinary book. The only problem I had was that I was reading it for the first time in English translation, and realized right away that Richard Zenith is a terrible translator of ALA (more on that below). But despite the bad translation, I was delighted not only by the crisp, palpable subtlety of ALA's character constructs, but also by the very effective plotting structure. Unlike in his early novels mentioned above, ALA in this novel and elsewhere now demonstrates an extraordinary talent for giving voice to characters very unlike himself, in a style that can even be called "Browning-esque". The danger of writing an internal monologue-type story is that a writer focuses too much on capturing the character's voice but with no actual story to back it up. This is not the case here - where the story takes us through the impact on the lives of a number of contemporary Portuguese people of a particularly high ranking government official's long slow march toward nothing - but the details of the story are very well distributed across the book, in a suspenseful, climactic pace that keeps the reader discovering new revelations and new twists until the end. Only upon finishing it, when you look back, you are able to say "ah, now I know what really happened and why" with a sigh of satisfaction. The highlight is a single soliloquy in the end by the single character who has previously not made an appearance other than as a memory in the minds of other characters but whose life choices and decisions 50 years ago tie the lives of each other character together by a thread - but for that character and her choices, the story would not have been exactly as it was. Her appearance is a perfectly timed climax and resolution to the loose ends of each character's narrative - a very well executed and compelling story.As much as I enjoyed this book, I really disliked Richard Zenith's translations. He takes liberties when he shouldn't - translating actual street, neighborhood and place names in modern day Lisbon into their literal English translations, even though they are universally known by the Portuguese names - for example. He also has a tendency to translate the Portuguese a bit too literally, rather than working with the idiomatic style and sound sense of each language. For example, it is common in Portuguese speech to begin a verb phrase in verbal first person narration with the first person subject pronoun but omitting the verb. For example "o garcom de repente levou o meu prato com a metade do bolo ainda por comer, e eu com o garfo na mao olhando a mesa". A literal translation by Richard Zenith might be "The waiter suddenly took my plate with half the cake still to eat, and I with the fork in my hand starring at the table". The problem is, no English speaker actually says "and I with ..." At best, it would sound much better in English to use the first person object pronoun "me", as in "The waiter suddenly took my plate with half my cake still to eat, leaving me with the fork in my hand, starring at the table." It isn't a literal translation - there is some "poetic license" - but it just sounds better in English. Unfortunately, it gets very tiring reading in 300 pages of internal monologues the phrase "and I with ..." over and over again. In Portuguese it is perfectly natural to say "e eu com..." - it makes the narrative more natural, verbal-sounding, and gives a mimetic quality to the characters' voices but in English it just sounds jilted and awkward - quite the opposite of ALA's intended effect.Other translators of ALA have their own drawbacks. It is of course best to read him in the Portuguese, as intended. But for me, I often have to settle for the English (or Spanish) translation. I try my best now to read ALA in the Portuguese, but in the country I live in, this is not always possible because his publisher, Dom Quixote, has decided not to allow his books to be sold by Amazon's Kindle Store in the original language in this country (for residents of Great Britain and France, rejoice, however!), although every time I am in Portugal now I try to buy a new ALA novel at the book store.For international readers, regardless of language, there are some preliminaries to consider before undertaking a read of any of ALA's books. To get the best enjoyment out of ALA, it helps to have a sense of the historical context in which ALA sets his novels: the mid-20th century Portuguese dictatorship under Salazar, the "Carnation Revolution" of 1974, the Portuguese colonial project in Angola, the "Guerra do Ultramar" or Portuguese Colonial War - especially in Angola, and independence of Angola and subsequent integration of Portugal into the European community. It is not that ALA's books are "about" these events - ALA writes very intimate, intense, psychological narratives that revolve around the personal, intimate, deepest private lives of people whose existence and public lives are impacted by these aforementioned big events. An international reader's appreciation for ALA's work will greatly be enhanced by a general familiarity with these big events.

This book in of course a fiction, but seemingly based on real events, at least partly. The story gives an interesting insight into life in Portugal during the Salazar period (1932-1968). It is said that power corrupts and that is indeed a central theme in this novel. On the negative side, I found it hard at times to understand whether the author was describing a real situation or dreams and fantasy. The author jumps from one scene to another. Also, I found the text rather long for the contents. I felt that the author could have got the main messages across in a text about half the length of the current one.