Lobo Antunes is a big-time Silent BFF, one of my personal favorite living fiction writers. And we Lobo heads are eating well, for another translation of a relatively recent short book has come out from Yale University Press, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
I wrote a review piece of this novel that ran in the indispensable Full Stop, which can be read here, if you’re interested. It’s something of a sequel to my piece on Warning to the Crocodiles that was published last year. And for the truly insane, see also a previous letter on Land at the End of the World—also translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Let’s hope the new translations of this prolific master keep on comin’ at this clip.
Meanwhile here are some notes on The Fat Man and Infinity, a selection of Lobo Antunes’s non-fiction sketches and short stories put out by W. W. Norton in 2009—and translated by Jull Costa like Land and Babylon.
Crónicas are not that prevalent outside of Portuguese and Spanish Latin American letters. The development of societies in the New World, and then urbanization, are essential historical ingredients to the genre. Anglo-American literature may have “literary reporting” and extended non-fiction essays, but they do not share the brevity and ephemerality that are hallmarks of the crónica.
Maybe it’s because Lobo Antunes has published novels that are so long and capacious, and when they aren’t, remain capacious in a concentrated form, that the prospect of sampling his work as a cronista was so tantalizing.
As of now he’s published four volumes of such texts, but a selection of the first two, from 1998 and 2004, have been arranged in The Fat Man and Infinity and Other Writings.
“The pieces collected in this book” Jull Costa says in the introduction
are a selection from the weekly or biweekly columns or cronicas that Lobo Antunes has written over the years for various publications, notably the Portuguese newspaper O publico.
And furthermore,
they have enjoyed the kind of popular success his novels never have; his novels are seen to be—and are—difficult, whereas the constraint of writing only 600 to 800 words forces him to rein in his expansive novelistic sensibility, and the result is these intense, evocative little gems of memoir, reflection, and fiction.
There were a lot of these by lines collected in this book that I read over several weeks. I only have some basic impressions to offer.
Two major elements that the crónicas share with the novels are the use of looping lines of dialogue, and a peculiar tone that Lobo Antunes has made his own.
It’s a sort of affected naivete, like the perspective of a child as presented by a more understanding adult.
The opening lines give an idea of this register:
I grew up on the outskirts of Lisbon, in Benfica, which, at the time, was small gardens, side streets, low houses, and listening to mothers calling in the dusk
— Vííííííítor
so loudly that, from Rua Ernesto da Silva, it reached the storks on the tops of the tallest trees and drowned out the peacocks in the lake beneath the poplars.
Experiences in youth, like a movie house on the beach, stamp themselves so as to define entire concepts for the narrator.
For me the cinema continues to be a shack on the beach with, fixed to one wooden wall, a sheet that billows and ripples in the evening breeze, long wooden benches and behind the benches the little hole of the projector that shuddered like a very ancient airplane and traversed the cinema from hole to sheet in a ray of dusty light that was the Holy Spirit of my childhood. You could hear the waves while the film was running, and I could smoke there with no risk that my father would suddenly appear
(for some reason, the other members of my family and adults in general didn’t enjoy spending two hours sitting on hard wooden benches with no backs)
A more extreme example comes from a crónica with the heading “Brazil”:
It was always a source of amazement to me that Pedro Álvares Cabral should have spent months sailing across the Atlantic to Brazil when Brazil was a mere half an hour’s car ride from my grandfather’s house. Every Christmas I went to Brazil with him without recourse to caravels, it was a land whose frontiers were Rua Alexandre Herculano and Rua Barata Salgueiro, and whose main geographical features were large houses and dark apartments inhabited by very ancient aunts
This tone carries over to the second part of the collection which pivots away from childhood to the period of being a mature artist.
I realized I was a genius when my novel began to appear on the shelves in bookshops; when my photo began appearing in newspapers; when I gave my first television interview. Conscious of my celebrity and my talent, I felt it would be wrong for me not to walk down the street or drive along in an open-top car, surrounded by bodyguards wearing Ray-bans, in order to show myself to the public and bestow blessings upon them.
In the piece “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—II” he relates reading his first attempts at fiction and poetry at age 12 to his mother, who gives him “the pained look one bestows on cripples and hopeless idiots,” but this only encourages him. He also consults his brother Pedro “who, having just turned nine, I judged…to be capable of evaluating my attempts.”
“from the height of his vast experience, Pedro, who never spoke, remained silent. But in that silence I could clearly see his admiration for my genius.”
An especially fascinating chronicle from the middle section was on classical music jazz. In his own words, Lobo Antunes likens literary composition to symphonic writing:
use characters like the instruments in an orchestra and transform the novel into a score. Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler were my models for The Natural Order of Things, The Death of Carlos Gardel, and The Inquisitor’s Manual, until I felt capable of composing something for myself, putting together what I had learned from jazz saxophonists, principally Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Ben Webster…
What about the last section, of actual short stories?
They do follow a strict procedure, all first-person with one exception, always addressing an “absent other” in Jull Costa’s phrase: long-suffering wives (actually a lot of disaffected and unhappy couples), widows. Looping phrases of speech present routine drudgery, all emotions disconcertingly suppressed.
Such is Lobo Antunes’s special flavor of loserdom.
These tiny narratives usually pick a conspicuous image at the beginning and play it back at the end. One story for example, called “My Father’s Robust Health,” is narrated by a guy whose mother has just eloped with his father’s best friend. The son admires the way his dad puts extra sugar in his coffee with a smile, but his mom says “—Look at him, the pig.”
My mother, who calls a spade a spade, says that he’s always itching to whip someone, whereas Senhor Bentes, because he’s so gentle, reminds her of the white mouse with pink eyes that my grandfather gave her when she was a child, only to step on it by accident two weeks later. This clearly upset her greatly because my grandfather had the mouse stuffed. It’s still there, slightly lopsided and glassy-eyed, on the doily on the sideboard, next to the china St. Sebastian in which every arrow is a toothpick.
When the mother finally leaves for good, the father stays in the garden, cleaning his teeth with the toothpicks and counting the stars above the loquat tree.
“I don’t know how many stars he’s gotten to now,” the narrator says to clench this story, “but scattered around the trunk of the loquat tree are about twenty of St. Sebastian’s arrows.”
A sample reading in the original Portuguese. (It sounds quite forceful.)