****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I bought this book, as a hardback, with a "Deckle edge" on the pages, from Amazon, for three bucks and some change. Should I be proud or ashamed? The price had to be below the actual cost of the printing and binding, leaving the publisher and author in deep negative territory. The first book by Antunes that I read was "The Return of the Caravels". I had high hopes - it was a great theme - the Portuguese caravels coming home after 500 years of empire, but I did not think he delivered as well as he could have. I was advised by a fellow Amazon reviewer not to give up on him; that this book was far better, and indeed it is. The picture on the cover is so evocative of its contents; yes, at least on this one, feel free to judge the book by its cover.The book is composed of 107 short stories, usually around three pages in length. It is divided into three parts, with the first two devoted to mainly childhood memories, and are told in the first person. If you are at all sentient, several of these stories should stir some long dormant neurons that contain incidents in your own childhood. Even though the place names in Portugal may be unfamiliar, there is the universality of the experiences that resonate. The third part is equally astonishing, maybe even more so. Instead of his own reminisces, he has a phenomenal ability to project himself into the lives of the people around him, male and female, and capture one of the dilemmas, if not the central one, of their life. As other reviewers have indicated, and I heartedly agree, this book is not for the "speed-read" crowd. The stories are meant to be savored, and reflected upon, and I rarely read more than six at a time. In numerous stories, I'd read just the first three sentences, and then "tabulated" the amount of information conveyed, in terms of setting, gender and age of the characters, social and economic status. In several of the stories, there were the considerations involving the expenditures for gas and electricity, which defined one class; in others, it was the considerations involving servants, which defined another class. His metaphors and descriptive passages are wonderfully fresh: "a good ballast of booze"; "I'm not an elderly man with the heart of a child. I'm a child whose envelope has grown slightly worn."From his youth, he would watch movies on the beach that were projected on a sheet. At age 11, he felt the first stirrings for the opposite sex, and felt that the 15 year old boys who "stole" them away were "decrepit." Far from the electronic gadgets that thrill today's youth, in a couple of stories he mentions the thrill of seeing the optical phenomenon of the "green flash" at sunset. There was the "You Can't Go Home Again" quality of a visit to a childhood home: "The only thing you can open with them are doors that no longer exist." "Brazil" was his aunts who went to pathways in a cemetery. His essay "Like Us," reminded me of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "I am waiting" in the collection A Coney Island of the Mind, Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti l Summary & Study Guide. And in terms of universal and now contemporary themes, one story contains a priest who stroked his knees, and asked about his "chastity," but quickly moved away when his aunts entered the room.Antunes has obviously been an intense observer of the human condition, and this is clearly reflected in Part III, where he dazzles with the incisive depictions of an incredible range of characters, mainly those enveloped in despair and desperation (most of humanity?). There is the banality of life, with people wearing almost identical purple and green track suits, going to the mall, bringing back someone else's wife, and does anyone notice? There are the disenchantments of lengthy marriages: a wife who discovers that her sister has been having a long term affair with her husband, and will seek revenge with the gigolos in Spain; the wife who doesn't want her husband to die now because people are watching, which was payback for a marriage filled with slights. There is the loneliness of a divorcee whose mom nags her about her weight, as she "listens to the pile of her carpet grow." These are only a small sampling of the themes and characters which Antunes addresses and depicts.A couple of his stories involved his experiences as a medical doctor in Angola during its war of independence, but I had hoped for more. His outlook might well have been contained in the story "Life Surprises Us Sometimes": "Because the people who weren't there with us and who were not therefore dying were the ba**ards in Luanda and Lisbon, the politicians, the generals, the big businessman..." Perhaps this theme will be further developed in "The Land at the End of the World". I intend to find out, and welcome any other suggestions.A marvelous book, that yes, Mike, deserves a re-read in five years or less. 6-stars.
