by António Lobo Antunes

António Lobo Antunes was born in Lisbon on September 1, 1942. A physician with a speciality in psychiatry, he served as a medic in Angola from 1971 to 1973, during the war of liberation. South of Nowhere (1979) is his second novel, after Elephant Memory, published earlier that same year. Both works address the wars of liberation in Angola, fought between the Portuguese army and the Angolan liberation movement. Of the 13 books he has written since, his latest are often considered more complex and less autobiographical, but he himself disagrees with this idea: “[My novels] are now much more consciously autobiographical. . . . The higher (apparent) complexity relates to the attempt of expressing more deeply what I feel and who I am through my characters” (Antunes, “Confissão,” p. 16; trans. A. Ladeira). One of the first novels to denounce the colonialist and nationalist excesses and...