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From literary master António Lobo Antunes, comes a richly textured and multi-vocal tale of two families and the secrets that bind them.
In The Natural Order of Things, a diabetic teenage girl in a Lisbon apartment complex is kept awake by the whispered childhood memories of the middle-aged civil servant lover she despises. Her father, once a miner in South Africa, is now reduced to dreams of “flying underground.” An officer in the pre-revolutionary army is tortured in prison on charges of conspiracy, plagued by memories of his illegitimate sister, locked away to live as a ghost in the attic like Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre. A secret policeman, who has abandoned his sanity to teach hypnotism by correspondence course, unwittingly holds the key to their secret histories.
The voices in The Natural Order of Things create a portrait of a disintegrating Portugal and a personal political history that attains the brilliance of Elias Canetti and Nikolai Gogol.
Praise for The Natural Order of Things:
“[A] work of poetic and erotic genius from a master navigator of the human psyche. . . . Antunes writes the tales of these two families with the insight of a Faulkner, of a man who knows the scent and the taste of the dust from which his characters are begotten and to which they return. . . . [His] is the voice of Nabokov by way of Cortazar, Gogol by way of Dylan.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“The Natural Order of Things takes its sinuous structure from the shape of the Tagus River, which purls through Lisbon and each character's consciousness in the same way the Liffey streams through Joyce's Dublin. . . . [Antunes] deserves a wide audience of discerning readers.”—The Washington Post Book World
“The Natural Order of Things . . . reads like William Faulkner or Céline . . . gorgeous . . . bedeviled [and] lyrical . . . a remarkable writer.”—The Boston Globe
“António Lobo Antunes's previous books have earned him comparisons to almost every literary master of the twentieth century–writers as diverse as Dos Passos, Céline, García Márquez, and Cormac McCarthy. This newly translated novel will likely have the same results, with Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury the most apt comparison. Lobo Antunes has a deft touch in creating a tapestry of voices out of the jumbled interior monologues of his characters.”—Review of Contemporary Fiction
“A unique, masterful, highly accomplished writer . . . The Natural Order of Things is both beautiful and intelligent . . . sure to satisfy on many levels . . . a novel of technical brilliance and compelling social immediacy.”—The American Book Review
“The Natural Order of Things evokes the movements of a symphony. . . . Magnificent and enchanting, studded with images . . . With The Natural Order of Things, the most astonishing of Portuguese novelists has revealed himself to be a fascinating, Proustian explorer of the labyrinths of memory.”—Le Figaro (Paris)
“A formidable narrative undertaking for any writer, and one which Antonio Lobo Antunes sustains with an impressively sure hand.”—El Pais (Madrid)
Praise for António Lobo Antunes
“A master navigator or the human psyche . . . [with] the voice of Nabokov by way of Cortazar, Gogol by way of Dylan.”—Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Perhaps Portugal’s greatest living author . . . A genius.”—Alan Kaufman, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
António Lobo Antunes, who was called “one of Portugal’s pre-eminent writers” by the New York Times, was born in Lisbon in 1942. The son of a physician, he too became a doctor and then spent four years in the Portuguese army during the Angolan war. His fictional “memoir” of that war, South of Nowhere, was internationally praised and followed by other widely translated and much-honored novels, including Act of the Damned, Fado Alexandrino, Explanation of the Birds, and The Natural Order of Things.