South of Nowhere

If happiness is the coincidence of good digestion with egotism, then we can understand why the protagonist of this brilliant novel is seldom happy. In Portuguese style, he lives with "saudades" of the past, of times gone by and irretrievable. But for him, happiness is far away as he recalls his despair, anger, disgust, and trauma at his experience of 27 months of colonial war in Angola back in the 1970s. A doctor with the frontline troops in the remotest part of a remote colony, he sees the endless, useless bloodshed, the cruelties and stupidities of a war waged by a small European country in the heart of a vast continent that it could never control. Portugal itself was poor and backward, what to say of its giant African colonies? The doctor talks to you, the reader, or is it a nameless woman with whom he shares a one night stand? It's a monologue....she departs without saying a word. Perhaps Portugal's occupation of African lands was something of a one night stand that lasted 400 years in part. The doctor hopes she will listen to his sad agonizings about what he did or didn't do; she should listen as he describes why he no longer believes in himself. The story is basically "how I survived the Angolan war". Maybe he didn't really survive as himself, but turned into another person, far older and more cynical than his actual years. What makes this novel unforgettable is the language, brilliantly translated into a poetic, lyrical monologue full of clever or beautiful images that will strike you as original. This novel, originally with a title probably unprintable on Amazon review pages, but having to do with an idiom in Portuguese meaning "the end of the world" or as Aussies say, "beyond the black stump", was the author's second. If you like this one, read his "Fado Alexandrino", a longer, more complex tour de force, also to do with soldiers returned from African wars. I wonder why Lobo Antunes has not received the Nobel Prize as yet. Proust and Faulkner come to mind.