The Inquisitors' Manual by António Lobo Antunes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sic transit horror mundi

The misery that was fascist and colonial Portugal. Not just the documented political and economic misery of the New State dictatorship but the social and emotional degradation which is impossible to establish on any metric. And not just the misery of the regime, but the misery of the revolution that overthrew it, including its aftermath.

Revolutions, violent or not, never have predictable consequences. Just as America has recently taken a crap-shoot with Donald Trump so Portugal rolled the dice in the Carnation Revolution of 1974 that overthrew the remnants of Oliveira Salazar’s corporatist, Catholic totalitarianism and dismantled the Portuguese empire in African and East Timor. And just as Trump will find that the undoing of international trade arrangements causes as much disruption as their creation, so Portugal found that the undoing of Salazar’s legacy was in many ways more painful than its continuation. Sadly, apart from anything else, revolution releases greed, envy and retribution far more readily than it does justice, equality and respect, particularly if you're a woman. As a consequence the net revolutionary effect on the human condition approaches zero, and does nothing to avoid the inevitability of human death. Sic transit...

Lobo Antunes has developed a unique way of telling a uniquely Portuguese story. Neither straightforward narrative nor stream of consciousness, his prose is what might be called multi-temporal; it jumps back and forth within the same paragraph, sometimes within a single sentence, over a forty or fifty year period, recalling events, emotions, and sensations into a coherent present, and punctuating that present with repetition of its most important phrase. It is also all recounted in the first person, but by at least a dozen persons, each with his own voice (and vice), whose narratives inter-weave.

It sounds complicated but, amazingly, the technique is not at all difficult to follow. In fact it is an extremely effective way to tell this complex cultural story. Lobo Antunes’s construction of individual histories is never too laboured. And his sequencing of narratives is perfectly timed. For my money The Inquisitors Manual is as good as the best of Jose Saramago. And because of a geographic realism that rivals that of Saramago, one can readily enter Lobo Antunes world South of the Tagus via Google Earth as an additional treat.

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