The Splendor of Portugal (Portuguese Literature)

Reading this book challenged my perseverance. Many times had I almost discarded the idea. But a wonderfully literary descriptive story of life as it was in Portugal managed to hold my interest, over and over, yet the repetitiveness finally finished me and tested my curiosity to an unacceptable degree. No doubt Antonio Lobo Antunes is a great writer yet for me my short attention span and impatience says more about me than about his craft.

Under the iron fist of the dictator Salazar, Portugal tried to hang on to its African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, through the mid-1970’s, way past the time when other European powers granted independence to former colonies. This novel is set in the mid-1990’s when the three children of former Portuguese colonists in Angola have been evacuated to Lisbon. The dark tone of the novel is illustrated by their grandmother who called her grandchildren, two boys and a girl, “the mulatto, the epileptic and the whore.” Their mother stayed behind to try to save the old plantation but she was lost in Angola’s civil war, involving multiple factions and outside powers including Cuba, the USSR and South Africa. The war for independence disintegrated into chaotic violence, terror and random butchery. This violence and social disintegration depicted in this novel reminds me very much of Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land, a novel of Mozambique’s war for independence, Portugal’s other African colony.The three children, now adults living in Lisbon, try to muddle through their damaged lives, the product of a plantation system in which Africans were still basically slaves, the violence, a self-centered mother and an alcoholic father. Each chapter focuses on a different person and about half of the book is set in modern Lisbon and half is based on reminiscense of their lives and their parents' lives in Angola. The oldest boy of mixed race, the product of the father’s relationship with an African prostitute, suffers discrimination and racial slurs even from his own family. The daughter is basically a high-class prostitute. The mentally disabled son lives in an institution and inflicts violence on animals whenever he can. The last thing you will find in this book is any “splendor.” The book’s title is taken from the classic Portuguese epic novel of that nation’s ocean explorations and discoveries, The Lusiads by Camoes.The book is structured as a series of run-on-sentences with paragraph structure but not much capitalization and some very deliberate, hypnotic repetition. Some example of Antunes’ literary skill: “There are times when I think that my parents bought such a tiny place on purpose in order to force the people who live in it to hate each other…” “… it has to do with the way sadness settles in, a dead man is just a dead man, but with a dead woman you never know when she’s going to sit down next to you and start a conversation…” “…thus in a way we were blacks to them [to the Portuguese back in Portugal] the same way that blacks owned other blacks and those blacks owned other blacks still, in descending steps that led all the way down to the depths of misery, cripples, lepers, the slaves of slaves, dogs…” “…our great misfortune, my father used to explain…was to have been born in God’s old age…a God who was losing his memory of himself and his memory of us, staring at us from a sick man’s easy chair with startled bewilderment…” Powerful stuff with the quality of a classic. With the passing of Jose Saramajo, Antunes is my nominee for the next Portuguese Nobel prize winner. He was born in 1942 and at least nine of his works have been translated into English.

This is an amazing book telling the story of a Portugese family in Angola. After independence the children move to Portugal, whereas the mother stays in Angola. The story is told from several person's perspective, in language that is poetical and compelling - I could never make myself stop reading in the middle of a chapter. It describes how each person's act in some way is a response, and how hard it is to say who is really responsible for violent acts, and how colonialism simply white people oppressing black people, but a hierarchy of some white oppressing other whites oppressing some blacks oppressing some blacks. It is a sad book, but the best one I have read in years.

I am really enjoying reading this book. It is an English translation of a work by Antonio Lobo Antunes. I first heard of this author on Anthony Bourdain's show about Lisbon.