2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A great Portuguese writer captures the joy and misery of family life
António Lobo Antunes's novels are inventions of inflamed interiority. They defy summation with a shrug. If our inner lives cannot be easily summarized, Antunes seems to say, then why should a novel? His sentences, long and unpunctuated, often accommodate several voices at once. And yet this polyphony belies his basic readability; it may not always be clear what is going on, or who is saying what, but the effect is nevertheless intensely absorbing. Yes, one thinks, this is indeed what our minds are made of: a commotion of thoughts, voices, memories half-remembered or wholly made-up, intrusions and evasions.