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In his eleventh novel, Antonio Lobo Antunes, one of the great European literary masters, chronicles the decadence not just of a family but of an entire society -- a society morally and spiritually vitiated by four decades of totalitarian rule. Senhor Francisco, a once powerful state minister and a personal friend of the Portuguese dictator Salazar, is incapacitated by a stroke, and as he spends his last days in a nursing home in Lisbon, he reviews his life and his loves. His son Joao, raised by the housekeeper, grows up to be good-hearted but totally inept, so that his ruthless in-laws easily defraud him of his father's farm. The minister's illegitimate daughter, Paula, whom he had with the cook and who was raised by a childless widow in another town, is ostracized after the Revolution due to her father's position in Salazar's regime. The emotional turmoil enveloping Francisco's family finally catches up with him when the Revolution ends the forty-two years of the dictatorship, and the old regime tumbles like a castle of cards. Senhor Francisco, more paranoid than ever, remains a large but empty shadow of his seeming omnipotence. The Inquisitors' Manual is at once an inquiry into the difficult coexistence of self-affirmation and tenderness toward others, and a powerful examination of a totalitarian sensibility. "what impels the reader through the hopeless, loveless landscape he paints is the sheer energy of the writing....." -- Margaret Jull Costa, Times Literary Supplement "The Inquisitors' Manual is a ... terrifying portrait of the moral decrepitude of Portugal during the [Salazar] dictatorship." -- El Periódico (Madrid)

"In so dark a tale there can be no chirpy affirmations, but only telling indictments of the corrupt, the cruel, and the unjust--and these Antunes memorably accomplishes."

Kirkus, 11/15/2002

"[W]hile each monologue traps us in the mind of a character who in turn is trapped within a narrow round of resentments, the overall effect is the reverse of claustrophobic; rather, it is a portrait of an entire society ruined. But if the device of the 'inquisition' gives the novel its social breadth, it is the way Antunes makes his characters tell their stories that gives it its remarkable temporal depth....Antunes orchestrates these temporal shifts with marvelous deftness and power."

William Deresiewicz, New York Times Book Review, 03/02/2003

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