An Explanation of the Birds: A Novel - Hardcover

Antunes, Antonio Lobo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802113397 ISBN 13: 9780802113399

Publisher: Grove Pr, 1991

Synopsis

Disatisfied with his life, Rui S. decides to change things, starting with a divorce from his nagging wife, Marilia, but before he can find the courage to speak, she decides to leave him

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Reviews

The Portuguese author of Fado Alexandrino offers a dizzying, kaleidoscopic portrait of a weak-willed man destroyed by the bourgeois expectations of his wealthy family. During the course of the novel, Rui S. suffers a mental breakdown, and the distinctions between fact and fiction, between past, present and future, blur in Antunes's brilliant narration. Rui imagines his family as circus performers; ruthlessly stripped of their pretensions, they regard his own suicidal tendencies as worthy of ring-side attention. These surrealistic musings are contrasted to Rui's own pathetic history, which is presented in the form of cynical testimonials by his relatives. When his first marriage (to a woman of his own class) fails, Rui, a candidate for a doctorate in history, falls in love with and marries Marilia, a Communist, working-class professor of semiotics, even though his family, and later Rui himself, realize that this relationship, too, is destined to fail. Marilia tries to induct him into her Communist cell, but the other members scornfully reject Rui because of his background. His brief flirtation with radical politics ends when he is jailed and has to be bailed out by his industrialist father. Rui fails even at his attempt to end his second marriage. At the beach resort he's chosen for the denouement, Marilia turns the tables and announces that she intends to leave him. The disintegration of Rui's personality proceeds rapidly from this point, but not before Antunes has a chance to explore the uneasy social politics of Portugal.
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A novel of dark, often bitter, humor and remembrance from Portuguese writer Antunes (Fado Alexandrino, 1990), whose hapless hero here represents all that's wrong with post-revolutionary Lisbon. Between a Thursday and a Sunday, Rui S.--a 33-year-old political historian and the son of a leading industrialist who has rebelled against his bourgeois family--recalls his unhappy past and anticipates a different future. Nothing has ever gone right for poor Rui. A failure in high school, expelled by the Communist Party for being too bourgeois, deserted by his first wife, and ignored by his second (a hard-line Communist and genuine member of the proletariat), Rui has only one happy memory to sustain him--talking about birds as a child with his father. And now that his mother is dying--while his philandering father is traveling as usual--Rui decides that he must somehow change his life, beginning with the upcoming weekend when he and his wife are away at a conference. At an appropriate moment he will tell her that he is going to leave her. Instead, the two end up at a run-down inn on the coast where the beach is home to hundreds of gulls--which, in turn, remind Rui of his one happy moment. Then, when his wife announces first that she's leaving him, Rui has no alternative but to do what he's already imagined. Surrounded by circling sea gulls, Rui ends his life--his one successful accomplishment. Antunes evokes a corrupt and dying world, infused with yearning for lost innocence, where even the food and weather are foul and where only suicide, however melodramatic, makes sense. A remarkable combination of angry satire and elegiac tenderness. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802113397
• ISBN 13: 9780802113399
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 261