Novel
The Land at the End of the World
Os Cus de Judas
António Lobo Antunes · 1979
Synopsis
In a Lisbon bar, a man talks until morning to a woman whose name and voice we never learn. A military doctor, he spent twenty-seven months in Angola stitching up mangled bodies or watching them die. He goes back to his childhood and tells of the heat, the boredom, the fear, the army, then the return home, where he remains caught in an anguish with no way out.
Context
The manuscript had met with several refusals when the psychiatrist Daniel Sampaio, its dedicatee, took it to the publisher Vega, who published it in 1979, the same year as Memória de Elefante. The chapters bear the letters of the alphabet. With Conhecimento do Inferno, published the following year, these books form what the author called his cycle of apprenticeship, drawn from his experience as a doctor in Angola; they set against the official account of the colonial war an intimate memory without heroism.
Who it is for
A novel in continuous monologue, with difficult syntax. There is almost no action, and the sentence is the real subject.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author known throughout the world; with Memória de Elefante, it established him as one of the most widely read and most translated Portuguese writers.
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