The Land at the End of the World: A Novel - Hardcover

Lobo Antunes, António

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393077764 ISBN 13: 9780393077766

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

One of the twentieth century's most original literary voices delivers a haunting and heartrending meditation on the absurdities of love and war.

Considered to be António Lobo Antunes's masterpiece, The Land at the End of the World--now in a new and fully restored translation by acclaimed translator Margaret Jull Costa--recounts the anguished tale of a Portuguese medic haunted by memories of war, who, like the Ancient Mariner, will tell his tale to anyone who listens. In the tradition of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, Lobo Antunes weaves words into an exhilarating tapestry, imbuing his prose with the grace and resonance of poetry. The narrator, freshly returned to Lisbon after his hellish tour of duty in Angola, confesses the traumas of his memory to a nameless lover. Their evening unfolds like a fever dream, as Lobo Antunes leaps deftly back and forth from descriptions of postdictatorship Portugal to the bizarre and brutal world of life on the front line. The result is both tragic and absurd, and belongs among the great war novels of the modern age.

About this title

About the Author:

António Lobo Antunes, born in 1942 in Benfica, is considered to be Portugal's greatest living writer. The author of more than twenty novels, including What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?, he has won many awards and makes his home in Lisbon.

Award-winning translator Margaret Jull Costa lives in England. 

Review:

“[Antunes] has created a memorably unhinged narrator, and [Costa] manages to capture, perfectly and faithfully, the bitter, hallucinatory and increasingly desperate tone of his monologue.”
- Larry Rohter, New York Times

“Lobo Antunes crafts macabre fever dreams as if possessed by an abler Poe, and few other novelists have his Bellovian ability to see both deeply and minutely, to render the world, the fallen world, as if never rendered before.”
- William Giraldi, Daily Beast

“Read António Lobo Antunes' The Land at the End of the World, and you, like the protagonist, may never forget the hallucinatory depravity, degradation and corruption of an unjust war.”
- Kai Maristed, Los Angeles Times

“Magnificent prose, dense with striking and unexpected imagery...I was so seized by the novel's spirit that I was motivated to turn to my own. I wanted to imitate Lobo Antunes, and I failed.”
- Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393077764
• ISBN 13: 9780393077766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224