The Return of the Caravels (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: António Lobo Antunes
- First Published: 1988
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: 1974 and the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
- Setting: Lisbon, Portugal, and former Portuguese colonies in Africa and India
- Principal Characters: Luís, Francisco Xavier, Pedro Álvares Cabral, Vasco da Gama, Dom Manoel I, Manoel de Sousa de Sepúlveda, Diogo Cão
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: 1970’s, Colonialism, Colonies or colonization, Twentieth century, Prostitution or prostitutes, Kings, queens, or royalty, Fifteenth century, Sixteenth century, Conquest, Renaissance, Tuberculosis, Portugal or Portuguese people
- Locales: Lisbon, Portugal
It is hard to imagine what the general reader will make of this novel, written in 1988 and only now translated. Set in Lisbon sometime soon after 1974, it chronicles the return not just of the Portuguese colonist, but of the colonization itself, the whole golden age of Portuguese discovery and conquest, which finally disappears, literally, into Lisbon’s trash bins. Because of this kind of surrealistic touch, António Lobo Antunes is often compared to the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961), who also set peregrinating narrators loose in crumbling cities to fulminate...
[The entire page is 1925 words long]
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