On the Nature of the Gods

António Lobo Antunes' shrewd language and exquisite handling of memory immerse us in the moral dilemmas that corruption and power entail in the polyphonic De la naturaleza de los dioses.

Fátima, a modest bookseller from Cascais, meets an old woman to whom she delivers books at her mansion by the sea. But what the woman is looking for is not books, but an interlocutor for her narrative. Fátima unexpectedly becomes her confidante. The old woman's desperate and urgent discourse, built on words she recognizes as hollow, sketches the story of her father's economic ascent and the consequences his figure had on all those who lived through his empire and power. The same mansion that echoes those memories was the lavish setting for the family's slow economic ruin, a ruin that combines with the one caused by old age in the body and imbues the different voices of this novel with melancholy and humanity.

Lobo Antunes, one of the greatest narrators in the Portuguese language, delves into power and the loss of meaning of hackneyed words: love and passion do not mean love and passion. Language appears broken, spoiled, and abandons the characters to an aphasic existence.

Reviews:
«Lobo Antunes' scenes are animated by the poetry of the everyday and tinged with the finest self-parody.»
J. M. Coetzee

«The heir to Conrad and Faulkner.»
George Steiner

«An author with a prodigious ability to capture masterpieces, who in five thousand years in clay or stardust, will continue to be read with passion.»
El País

«Lobo Antunes shows empathy for the contradictions of human feelings. He is a warm-blooded writer.»
The New York Times Book Review

«One of the most skilled psychological portraitists.»
The New Yorker

«To the writer's skill, in the way he lets the narrative run its course, allowing the writing hand to follow the thread of the stories that accumulate in his unstoppable mental carousel, is added a centripetal force that maintains the cohesion of the edifice, giving it solidity and meaning.»
Expresso

«If nothing changes in this country, António Lobo Antunes is a cicerone of what constantly changes: the nature of the novel as a perceptible path to rescue the lost and/or "stolen" past and, through it, to imagine another nature for things and for dreams.»
Jornal de Letras

«A master navigator of the human psyche... A mix of the voice of Nabokov, Cortázar, Gogol, and Dylan.»
Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times Book Review

«Perhaps the best living author in Portugal... A genius.»
Alan Kaufman, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

«Undoubtedly, Antunes is an author worth reading for his literary talent and his insights into the history, geography, and national character of Portugal.»
Publishers Weekly