The Natural Order of Things - Paperback

by António Lobo Antunes (Author), Richard Zenith (Translator)

From literary master Antóoacute;nio 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.

Author Biography

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.