The Land at the End of the World: A Novel

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.