The Empire Strikes Out

The lingering effects of colonialism take hold in The Return of the Caravels.

by Andrew Ervin

The Return of the CaravelsBy António Lobo Antunes (translator Gregory Rabassa) Grove, 224 pp., $24

The Return of the Caravels maintains the amorphous ontology of a nightmare or, in this case, a re-imagined dream in which time and distance have lost their lease. The history of Portuguese literature and the literature of Portuguese history come crashing together under the watchful, often voyeuristic gaze of António Lobo Antunes, who -- along with Nobel laureate José Saramago -- is one of the great grandpappies of his nation’s written tradition.

His latest export takes place independently of any definite historical context, but it incorporates figures from the age of exploration and imperial plundering. In Caravels, the greatest commodores of Portugal's past return home (hence the title) in the 1970s, during the revolt of the last African colonies. Antunes forces his sailors to confront the lingering effects of empire building, not on the foreign subjects but on the civilian population left back in Lisbon. It's an exhilarating but uncomfortable voyage for the reader, who as a matter of course is shaken to the point of existential nausea by the rolling, rollicking prose.

Sentences linger forever, caught in miniature whirlpools of causality and effect. A mulatto woman reappears at different times and like a Greek chorus provides a little perspective on the goings-on. Narration leaps back and forth in time and sensibility; first-person accounts give way to third-, usually without rounding second, which gives us a better understanding of the characters' culture shock. Right now, someone in Lisbon is no doubt writing a Ph.D. thesis on the symbolic importance of Bakelite in this book.

"At first I didn't know what to do in such an absurd place called Lixbon [sic], with no marmosets on the beaches or hippopotamuses in bathtubs, a capital, my beloved children, lacking in tobacco and cotton, more ancient and quiet than a paralytic aunt, whose doors and windows climbed up and down hillsides, blinking their chintzes at an anchorage of hydroplanes."

Even in translation Antunes' language resembles a beat poem of epic proportions set in some timeless version of Portugal. All that's missing are the line breaks. A vast parade of colorful similes lightens the proceedings: An elderly woman resembles "a sea lion with goiter" while prostitutes in waiting are likened to "fleshy Buddhas" and cockroaches look like "wedding shoes with antennae."

Given the humor and poetic range in evidence, it should come as no surprise to discover that Antunes loosely based his novel, originally published 14 years ago, on Portugal's national epic, The Lusiads. Luís de CamÕes -- who repeatedly shows up in Antunes' book in the guise of "the man named Luís" -- wrote his poem in 1572 to celebrate the intellectual sophistication of his beleaguered nation. He uses Vasco da Gama's historic trip to India at the turn of the 15th century as a shining example of man's sovereignty over nature and to some extent a justification for feckless imperialism. In that poem, as in Antunes' novel, recent history and ancient myth mingle tirelessly.

One character in Caravels is shown carrying "a pocket edition of The Lusiads, with naked dancers on the cover, published in a collection of detective novels." In this updated epic, Luís appears one day on the docks of Lisbon dragging with him a casket containing the remains of his dead father. Likewise, da Gama arrives with a deck of playing cards in his pocket and quickly swindles everyone in sight. What the corpse or cards represent in symbolic terms is wide open for speculation. Both Antunes and Portuguese history offer numerous clues, many of which contradict each other.

Less arguable is Antunes' gift for uniting disparate elements into a single narrative, albeit a thoroughly absurd one. His shiny prose acts like the clear plastic meant to preserve a living room sofa for all eternity; the reader can get close to it, sees it perfectly well, but it always remains uncomfortable and just out of reach. He removes that covering and even when he spills something -- he exhibits every possible bodily fluid in this book -- the exposed material maintains its original grandeur. Antunes' ability to offer a small glimpse behind that historical surface makes for an ambitious, avant-garde and hugely successful work of art.

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there