Jackson Pollock once said, 'Every good artist paints what he is', which is something I was reminded of and felt was particularly pertinent to 'The Land at the End of the World' by Antonio Lobo Antunes. Antunes trained as a psychiatrist but, through national service, spent 27 months as an army medic during Portugal's doomed colonial war in Angola. His alienating experiences in the African country serve as the subject matter for this strongly autobiographical novel. So too, his childhood memories of family pressures surrounding his conscription and the later opposition to the government who sent him there. The protagonist, an army doctor sent to Angola, lives the life of Antunes, expatiating his experiences to his reader in an amalgam of digression and visceral diatribe.

Antunes is a god of simile and metaphor. At first, they were all I noticed and I perhaps felt there to be too many, but as the novel progressed, they were the engine to his evocative and macabre prose, filling my mind with powerful imagery as I vicariously experienced the grim and futile labours in ‘the armpit of the world’. In conjunction with this, a mention must go to the translator Margaret Jill Costa (who I understand has won many awards) who has done a magnificent job in translating his exemplary prose. Earlier this year, I waxed lyrical about the writing of David Foster-Wallace, believing that he was a class part in his manipulation of language, but I have seen in only a few months that other writers with equal genius exist, Antunes being the first I’ve to encounter since making the bold claim.

An example:

Gradually, the wear and tear of war, the never-changing landscape of sand and sparse woods, the long, sad months of mist that turned the sky and the night the sepia brown of faded daguerreotypes, had transformed us into a species of apathetic insect, machines made to withstand a day-to-day existence filled with hopeless hope, afternoons spent sitting on barrel-stave chairs or on the steps of the former administration post, staring at the excessively lethargic calendars on which the months lingered with maddening slowness, while endless leap days, full of hours, swelled up around us like great bloated, putrefying bellies that kept us imprisoned with no hope of salvation. We were fish, you see, in aquariums of cloth and metal, dumb fish, simultaneously fierce and tame, trained to die without protest, to lie down without protest in those army coffins, where we would be welded in, covered with the national flag, and sent back to Europe in the hold of a ship, our dog tags over our mouths to quash even the desire to utter a rebellious scream.

I look forward to the many other offerings from this writer, a genius who may be lost in Saramago's shadow yet who very much deserves to share the light. 5/5 ( )

Lobo's tangled, sweaty prose with its overwrought similes works well when it's describing the infernal experience of the war in Angola; it's less suited to the Lisbon-set frame story in which the PTSD'd narrator has a grimy one-night stand. The sex-writing (in both narratives) in particular is of its time, repugnant even on the few occasions it isn't trying to be. But as a document of colonial brutality and futility, a memoir of the Portuguese dictatorship, and a concentrated catalogue of horrors, Os Cus de Judas (it's been translated under two different titles) packs one heck of a wallop. ( )

Antunes tunes into vivid illusions. Had I known of his work, I wouldn't have bothered reading László Krasznahorkai. Mr. Lobo's work has the same breathless fluidity, but the imagery is stronger, the dramatic pulse is quicker, and it appears far more inclusive, as opposed to the Hungarian's stark Beckett-like isolationism.

This great Portuguese war surgeon turned writer utilizes warlike tangles of symbolism to tango with heartache and human futility. Within nested imagery and dense, coupling metaphors, he explores multilayered settings with floral sentences, replete with luscious detail, free associating between dreamlike war reminiscences and enigmatic conquests. His haunting, serpentine, grisly prose, is both harrowing and alluring to behold. His seamless narration passes from atmospheric locales like a disembodied spirit of defiance, blending poetry and terror in a grueling alphabet soup of evanescent verbal eruptions. Since this is an anguished monologue, it dehumanizes with its existential horror and paints rich pastiches of a war-torn Angola from the desperate exile of Lisbon.

Baring his soul, the narrator conjures famous artists: Rembrandt, Dali, Bosch - overlaying their immortal scenes with his own shattered memory - "Cézanne's card players" appear before his beleaguered eyes, and so do "El Greco's greyhounds" and Magritte's skies. There are many integrated literary references and a tone reminiscent of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, about men forgotten in far corners of the world, struggling to undo the incomprehensible atrocities of well-fed, demonic leaders. An uncomfortably profound read. A lucid nightmare of knotted analogies. And some of the most enlightening rants I've ever encountered. ( )

THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD is a book that kept turning up in discussions of war lit, which is a specialized genre that always arouses my interest so I decided to give it a look. Considered the masterpiece of prolific Portuguese writer Antonio Lobo Antunes, the English title is a cleaned up version of something more like "The A**hole of the World." Any soldier who has ever been posted to a remote or primitive site with few of the amenities of civilized life will understand.

Told in a first person, circular, colorful narrative of seemingly endless runon sentences depicting nightmarish scenes of hideous combat injuries and disfigurements, interspersed with erotic sexual couplings, the aged narrator is looking back at his time as a new doctor conscripted into the Portuguese army and posted to the interior of Angola where a shadowy war continues to sputter and spark between stultifying boredom and explosions of bloody violence. (How's THAT for a runon?) Haunted by specific visions - his male nurse sitting stunned in the dust holding his bloody intestines in his hands following an attack, or the dead young soldier he wrapped gently in a sheet and put him in his own room, telling himself he was only asleep, or the camp dogs licking the operating room blood from his clothing, arms and hands - the narrator, in endless interior monologues to various sexual partners past and present, attempts to lose himself in drink and eroticism.

There are numerous flashbacks to his childhood and youth in Benfica and Lisbon, often skilfully contrasted with the awful circumstances of his two years of boredom, whoring, drinking and misery in Angola. I was often reminded of Yossarian and his "Snowdens of yesteryear." Think CATCH-22, but without the humor. There are also passing references to Fitzgerald, and maybe also to e.e. cummings' war novel, THE ENORMOUS ROOM, along with numerous allusions to Portuguese, Brazilian and other European writers, artists, politicians and more.

I can understand now why this book has earned a place in the canon of war literature. The writing is sinuous and graceful - although it's difficult to know how much the translator (Margaret Jull Costa) figures in. The endless, convoluted sentences were sometimes problematic, although you do get used to it after while. But war lit, yeah. It definitely belongs. I'm glad I read it, and will recommend it highly to fellow war lit buffs.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA ( )

The Land at the End of The World by Antonio Lobo Antunes

The narrator, a middle-class Portuguese medical student is encouraged by his family to join the Army and go to Angola to fight the war that the Dictator Salazar was fighting to save Portugal’s false glory and his own grip on power. Sadly…

“True to the family prophesy, I had become a man: a kind of sad, cynical greed made up of lascivious despair, egotism, and an eagerness to hide from myself had replaced forever the fragile pleasure of childish joy, of open, unreserved laughter, embalmed in purity, and which at night, when I’m walking home down a deserted street, I seem to hear, echoing at my back like a mocking cascade.”

Antunes, a psychiatrist, who himself served as a doctor in Angola in the 1970s tells this tale of a medic whose experience in the war changes him forever.

Through an ample dose of magical metaphors and poetic phrasing Antunes’ creative imagination can, at times, dazzle and overwhelm the effects of this war on both the African populace and the soldiers who are held in check by Salazar’s secret police.

The narrator is doomed, witnessing what he does, he becomes a sad, depressed and disillusioned man, cut off from family he drinks, loses sleep and the ability to love another person. Back in Lisbon he tells his tale to an unnamed lover as he relates how the war changed him.

“deep down of course, it is our own death that we fear when we imagine someone else’s – and that is what makes cowards of us all”.

There is a fair amount of sexual description which relates how he was loved well by an Angolan native recounting their lovemaking like, “making love to one another, as furiously as rhinoceroses with toothaches”. Yet his sexuality fades as do most of his other desires.

In the end this is a daunting, poetic indictment of dictatorships, war and imperialism. Antunes in his writing is as persuasive as Clarence Darrow and creative as both Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

A classic literary work, a cautionary tale, considered one of the great books of modern day Portuguese literature. ( )