The Land at the End of the World: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)You read this 1979 book by António Lobo Antunes for his images, brilliantly realized in this new translation by Margaret Jull Costa, whom readers will know from her work with José Saramago. Here is the perhaps-autobiographical protagonist describing a visit to the Lisbon zoo with his father as "a place full of strange invented birds in cages, ostriches that looked just like spinster gym teachers, waddling penguins like messenger boys with bunions, and cockatoos with their heads on one side like connoisseurs of paintings; the hippopotamus pool exuded the languid sloth of the obese, cobras lay coiled in soft dungy spirals, and the crocodiles seemed reconciled to their Tertiary-age fate as mere lizards on death row." The descent from childish curiosity to metaphors of excrement and death is not accidental.
In 1971, Lobo Antunes, recently qualified as a doctor, was drafted into the Portuguese army and sent for two years to Angola, mired already for a decade in a bloody war of independence. The original title of the book, OS CUS DE JUDAS, refers to a bodily orifice that should probably not be named here, but it is apt. In her helpful introduction, Jull Costa quotes a description of the war in Angola as "a form of colonial sodomy -- the Portuguese state simultaneously violating the rebellious colony and its own reluctant, traumatized troops." The book, a masterpiece in its way, is not a novel in the normal sense; there are few named characters and hardly a story. Its short chapters, in only the vaguest chronological order, consist of a running monologue addressed to some woman in a bar or bedroom encounter that ends in "the exhausted silence afterward of marionettes deserted by the fingers that worked them." Jull Costa compares him to the Ancient Mariner; he describes himself as a "disoriented Lazarus," returned from the dead yet dead still in his soul. The tragedy here is not so much the horrors of the battlefield (though these are bad enough), but the degradation it inflicts on its soldiers, many of whom become drunkards, deserters, suicides, and in some cases rapists, torturers, and worse. The narrator avoids the worst of these fates but, like that of the author himself, his marriage ends in divorce, despite the love of his young wife and the birth of his two daughters. Lobo Antunes, who has practiced psychiatry alongside his writing, is clearly as interested in PTSD as in anatomizing the trauma itself, and this post-traumatic stress is as sad as they come.
But colorful writing can also be a disadvantage. I found myself reading less for what Lobo Antunes was describing than for the language in which he describes it. The horror, in other words, did not hit home, only the aftermath of horror. Just occasionally, though, among this nightmare of death, degradation, and debauchery, there are some things that are so understated that they catch you entirely unawares. "I happened to walk into the sergeants' bathroom, into the eternally flooded, stinking pigsty known as the sergeants' bathroom, and saw the officer clutching the prisoner to him in a kind of epileptic frenzy, the shy, silent girl was leaning against the tiled wall, her eyes blank, and above their heads, through the window, the plain opened out in a majestic fan of subtle shades of green, where one could make out the slow, zigzagging, almost metallic sheen of the river and the great peace of Angola at five in the afternoon, refracted through successive, contradictory layers of mist." That surprising word "peace" -- how incredibly powerful! Sometimes the persistence of beauty is the worst torture of all.

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