| Reviews: |
|
chris (Japan) (2007/12/29):
From Publishers Weekly
Awarded the Portuguese Writers' Association Grand Prize for Fiction, this novel allows American readers another glimpse at Antunes's difficult, malicious brilliance. Set in Portugal in the mid-1970s, it concerns a bourgeois family trying to settle the estate of its dying patriarch, Diogo, and escape the country before what they believe will be a dangerous socialist takeover. But it is around Rodrigo, Diogo's voraciously greedy son-in-law, that the story revolves, as he schemes to secure what money remains after Diogo's lifetime of crooked investments. Other contenders for the fortune are Diogo's three children: Leonor, wife of Rodrigo, bitter after his years of philandering; simple-minded Goncalo, obsessed with his model trains and married to the nameless mother of Francisco and beautiful Ana; and a severely retarded woman whose daughter (by Rodrigo) is referred to as "the cousin." Each character narrates a facet of the story, which itself just barely emerges from Antunes's (Elephant Memory) dazzlingly tangential style. Of the 10 perspectives given voice, that of Nunu, Ana's caustic husband, comprises the first third of the book; voices outside the clan include a doctor and a notary, both of whom are horrified at the family's corruption, which takes its most disturbing form in the compulsive incest perpetrated by Rodrigo. Set over five days, the narrative modulates between the characters' memories, fantasies and realities in darkly funny imagistic riffs. This tale of familial sin and disintegration (luminously translated by Zenith) chillingly mimics the surrounding political climate, as two dictatorships?of Portugal and of this family?perish.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal
Written ten years ago and set 20 years ago as the fall of Antonio Salazar ushered in an imaginary Communist revolution, this novel by Portugal's foremost writer, described as an amalgam of Celine and Dos Passos, deftly sketches a disintegrating world of scampering capitalist mice, once fattened on the cheese of factories and estates and now desperate to flee across the Guadiana into Spain. Against this setting unfolds Rodrigo's selfish struggle to cheat his simple-minded siblings of their inheritance. But despite his wiliest machinations, the inheritance is revealed to have been squandered on casinos, whorehouses, and medical treatments for the two idiotic siblings. A friendless Rodrigo is left stranded among gloating Communists. Hilarious in its baroque accumulation of detail and stunning for the author's control of his constantly shifting narrative voices, this work is worth committing to. For general readers as well as specialists.?Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
|
