The Fat Man and Infinity: And Other Writings

Based on THE FAT MAN AND INFINITY, António Lobo Antunes is a major author, whose relative obscurity in this country - despite having had at least ten works translated into English - is rather baffling. He has never been mentioned in "The New York Review of Books", at least according to its search engine. His Wikipedia profile is eleven sentences long. There is, however, an excellent article on him by Peter Conrad in the May 9, 2009 issue of "The New Yorker". Conrad reports that in Portugal the fans of Lobo Antunes claim that the wrong man won the Nobel Prize when it was awarded to his countryman José Saramago in 1998.Lobo Antunes, born in 1942, went to medical school and shortly after graduation served a three-year stint as a doctor in Angola in the midst of the harrowing war for independence. Upon his return to Portugal he continued to practice medicine, with a specialty in psychiatry. Somehow he managed to find the time to write more than twenty books. He has also written for various Portuguese publications weekly or biweekly columns or "crónicas", which have been collected in three separate volumns. THE FAT MAN AND INFINITY brings those three volumns of crónicas together, superbly translated by Margaret Jull Costa (who has also given us marvelous translations of other Iberian authors, among them Javier Marías).Most of the pieces are three or four pages long. All of them are written in the first person. Two of the volumes of pieces purport to be non-fiction - memoirs, reminiscences, or ruminations. The third volume collects stories - fictional emotional x-rays. To my mind, the non-fiction pieces are better. Indeed, some of them are among the finest short pieces I have ever read. They generated the same sort of excitement within me as when I first discovered the prose narratives of W.G. Sebald.Collectively, the non-fictional pieces are miniatures of nostalgia and mortality. Again and again, Lobo Antunes evokes the fragile bittersweet moments of childhood, the objective details of which are solidly grounded in Lisbon and its environs, but the subjective spirit of which is universal. Interlaced with the nostalgia are variations on the theme of this fugitive life."* * * but there was no death, for a long time there was no death, death was the little oval images of saints in my mother's prayerbook, I was eternal, at what precise point, I wonder, did I cease to be eternal, I who was eternal for so many years * * *"The fictional stories are almost all rueful narratives about a life turned sour - the flames of love have died or the infirmities of age and the inevitability of death no longer can be ignored. In most, the narrators stoically insist that they are happy, though their accounts reveal bleak and hollow lives. In their grubbiness and blinkered despair, the stories somehow remind me of those of Raymond Carver.In one piece, Lobo Antunes relates that he had wanted to be a writer since being a young boy. At age fourteen he sent a few pieces to a periodical and they were published in a section called "New Young Writers." "Seeing my work in print filled me with doubts: I began nebulously to understand that there was a difference between writing well and writing badly. Later on, the realization that there existed an even greater difference between writing well and creating a work of art brought on a feeling of full-blown angst."Lobo Antunes not only writes well but in THE FAT MAN AND INFINITY he has created two dozen or so true works of art. One needs to read them slowly, absorb them and only then savor them. Reading the book is much like a trip to the Louvre or the Prado; to begin to do justice to the works, one must limit oneself to four or so on each trip. But what a reward! THE FAT MAN AND INFINITY, especially the first two volumes of non-fiction pieces, gets my highest recommendation.

I recently saw this title in the new book section of the the library, was intrigued and took it home. I became an instant convert! Billy Collins, former US poet laureate, has said : "His descriptive quickness and his genius for metaphor causes the line between prose and portray to vanish before our astonished eyes." Harold Bloom, literary critic, said: "One of the living writers who will matter the most."Antunes is easily in the company of James Joyce, William Faulkner and Sigmund Freud, all three of whom he has acknowledged as influences, while remaining a great original himself. If you enjoy good poetry and its inherent ambiguity, his writings are bound to astonish you. The present book is a collection of 107 short pieces, 600 to 1000 words, partly a memoir, that is an excellent, very approachable introduction to his many novels. I have now read three of his novels and am finishing a fourth, where his imagination really soars. I write some poetry and found his works really inspiring in my pursuit of my own imagination, stirred up by his. Each of his works is a treasure chest about the human condition. He is a meticulous craftsman -- he reports that three pages a week is about his usual pace for his novels.Many of the 107 pieces have been published previously as newspaper pieces, so reading all 107 pieces at one go might be overwhelming compared to enjoying one a week. The stories have a ordinary coherence that his novels sometimes do not. In his novels he allows himself to tell a story from points of view of many of the minds of his characters, weaving these voices in his original manner. At times it seems the reader is left with little clue as to who is saying what, but after while, with persistence, one can catch on to his method. In my opinion Antunes is much more successful than Joyce was in his Ulysses in communicating to the reader his characters and their rejoicing and suffering in the human condition. I am glad I read The Fat Man & Infinity first. To read his novels the reader has to draw on his own imagination as a raft to ride the seas of ambiguity Antunes provides. Without such a raft, interest will drown. Each reader no doubt has a different trip, different vistas, different thrills. This is also true for Joyce's Ulysses, Ledo Ivo's Intruder and Garcia Marquez's novels, but for me, Antunes' seas are the most worthwhile.Antunes, in his novel What Can I Do When Everything Is on Fire?, makes what seems to be a self reference about his writing: "..., I wrote it with this memory of the feeling I had as a way of seeing that I wouldn't lose it." (p. 233). This is the outlook of the poet. He piles descriptions upon description, interwoven by remarks of one or more minds to create the rich sea of words that one must navigate to absorb the feelings he is communicating. And his novels deal with much tragedy and sorrow and cruelty in the human condition as well as longings, desires and love. He trained and practiced as a psychiatrist, principally in the Angola War and in state hospitals, for many years before he launched his career as a writer. However, he knew he had to be a writer from age 12 on. His psychiatric training and experience no doubt was valuable in allowing him to delve deeply into human feeling without becoming a mental or emotional case himself. In addition, as he relates in the book reviewed, in the guise of one of the stories, he learned a valuable lesson from one of his patients in keeping the appearance of sanity, that is, to fill your briefcase full of oranges and go to the zoo to talk to the tigers.

The comment that Antunes is a better writer than Jose Saramago convinced me to read his book. The book is a series of newspaper columns written by Antunes over the years. Each segment is 3 or 4 pages in length and makes for easy pick up and put down. The stories are not sequential and stand alone. As does Saramago, Antunes uses a writing technique that prevents skimming; they want the reader to slow down and think of what he is reading. Antunes puts a paragraph space in a sentence, and inserts in paretheses another related thought. I find many of his stories dark: couples are breaking up dying or disapearing with their belongings. One wonders about Antunes' marital status, he appears to have a daughter. A better comparison with Saramago's work would be a novel by Antunes.

wonderful, sharp and moving short pieces. Think Russell Baker, but untethered.

Antonio Lobo Antunes is, definitively an author in shade of Saramango. Once discovered it it the pleasure to know his writings.

Well-written literary fiction, stories about his childhood in Portugal. Short stories (columns) so easy to dip in and out of. I found the stories a bit self-indulgent though, and after three or four lost interest. Depends on your literary taste.

Great book.