ALA NO NEW YORK TIMES

Reproduzimos mais abaixo e na íntegra um artigo sobre o António Lobo Antunes, publicado no passado dia 20 deste mês no New York Times.

Impressionistic Meditations for Gray Days

Writing last year in The Nation, Natasha Wimmer, the gifted young translator of Roberto Bolaño’s major novels into English, described the rivalry between the Portuguese novelists José Saramago and António Lobo Antunes. When Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, Ms. Wimmer wrote, “there were those who believed that the wrong writer had been chosen.”

One of those people may have been Mr. Antunes. In 1998, when a reporter for The New York Times called him for a comment about Saramago’s Nobel, Mr. Antunes said, “This phone doesn’t work!” and cut the connection.

Mr. Saramago, born in 1922, and Mr. Antunes, born in 1942, are not easily confused on the page. Mr. Saramago’s style is spare and allegorical. His best novels, like “Blindness” (1998), build like ticking cerebral thrillers. Mr. Antunes’s work, on the other hand, is chaotic and jagged, in a style that can be reminiscent of Faulkner’s.

Yes, I know, most difficult writers get compared to Faulkner at some point. But in Mr. Atunes’s case the parallels aren’t insignificant. His novels have Faulkner’s torpor and class preoccupations, and his way of circling around topics and returning to them. The novels, also like Faulkner’s, are polyphonic and full of temporal shifts. Both writers can be headache makers. Faulkner is more often worth the migraines.

At his best Mr. Antunes can be magnificent — his stream-of-consciousness novel “The Inquisitors’ Manual” (1996), about life under the long rule of Portugal’s dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, casts a grim, unruly spell. At other times he seems to be going through the motions. About his most recent novel to be published in English, the glumly repetitive “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” (2008), all I can say is: I’d rather pull a toenail off with rusty pliers than march through its punishing 585 pages again.

Mr. Antunes’s new book, “The Fat Man and Infinity,” is easily the most accessible volume of his work to be made available in English. It collects the short, impressionistic newspaper columns, or “cronicas,” that he has written for various publications, notably the Portuguese newspaper O Público.

Mr. Antunes has played down these columns, referring to them as “divertissments,” written to earn pocket money. But as this book’s translator, Margaret Jull Costa, points out, in Portugal these collections “have enjoyed the kind of popular success his novels never have.” (This book also contains a selection of Mr. Antunes’s short stories — more on them later.)

Mr. Antunes makes for an unusual newspaper columnist. Jimmy Breslin he’s not. His bite-size essays contain no political ruminations and almost nothing about sports, or popular culture, or literary criticism or run-ins with the great and good. Instead they are interior diaries of a kind, most of them imbued with a deep nostalgia for the author’s youth.

Childhood is a topic upon which Mr. Atunes can be deeply observant and charming. “I learned to distinguish the various adults by the medicines placed between napkin and glass,” he writes. “My grandmother’s drops, my grandfather’s cough syrups, the various colors of my aunts’ tablets, my cousins’ little silver pillboxes, the vaporizer for asthma that my godfather used, jaws gaping like some desperate grouper fish.”

He continues: “I’ve never quite understood when one stops being little and becomes grown up. Probably when the blonde relative starts being referred to — in Portuguese, not French — as that slut Louisa.” Mr. Antunes makes it plain that he remains a 12-year-old boy at heart. “I must be getting old,” he says. “And yet, without realizing, I still find myself feeling in my pocket for my catapult.”

Mr. Antunes writes well about other topics, including jazz. “The people who really helped me mature as a writer,” he says, “were all musicians.” He can sometimes, alas, come off like a Portuguese Andy Rooney, ranting about pipsqueak annoyances. One column begins: “I hate traffic lights.”

There’s an anti-intellectual, or at least an anti-high-art, streak to Mr. Antunes’s columns. He dislikes opera. In museums he is “more fascinated I think by the burglar alarms than I am by the pictures.” When he takes his daughter to the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, and she declares that she’s bored, he writes: “I jumped for joy and carried her off to a really seedy cafe and ordered two vanilla ice creams. We spent hours licking them and mine was so good that I can still remember the taste.”

Given the elite audience Mr. Antunes’s high-Modernist fiction mostly appeals to, it’s a mildly odd position to take. It’s also unsettling to see him confess, “I never read my work: I simply produce it.” Anyone who makes it through the short stories that make up the final third of “The Fat Man and Infinity” will wish the author had reread them quite a few more times.

The stories are gray, lifeless depictions of lower-class life in Portugal. Three representative titles are “A Feeling of Oh, What’s the Point,” “Will You Please Stop Bugging Me?” and “My Death.” Oh, and here are three of the stories’ upbeat first few words, chosen almost at random: “Gray Sundays leach into us,” “It’s not so much when it rains” and “My old man died yesterday.”

The mood is one of almost Beckett-like alienation. Mr. Antunes’s prose is flat and unengaged; there is barely a simile to be found.

You’ll want to linger over this book’s cakelike, bittersweet cronicas. But the short stories? Burglar alarms are more interesting. Their author can’t be bothered to read them, and I’m not sure why anyone else should, either.

THE FAT MAN AND INFINITY

And Other Writings

By António Lobo Antunes

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

Illustrated. 396 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95