Article #256784

With an exacting modernist style and the courage to address fascism and colonialism head on, Lobo Antunes’s writing is a deluge of unforgiving truths in lush prose

• António Lobo Antunes, Portuguese novelist who chronicled dictatorship and war, dies aged 83

António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese novelist who died this week in Lisbon at 83, had little patience for discussing his craft. The mechanics of writing were, he liked to say, “such a bore!”. Yet few writers of his generation showed greater stylistic daring – when José Saramago was awarded the 1998 Nobel prize in Literature, many in Portugal felt the honour had gone to the wrong writer.

Over the course of more than 30 novels, Lobo Antunes honed an exacting modernist style all his own, using it to explore Portugal’s relationship with its fascist past, and to confront the tragic futility of its final colonial campaigns in Africa. Often dismissed as a difficult writer, Lobo Antunes crafted prose that was stubbornly flirtatious, at once inviting and resisting the reader. His sentences, lush with intricate metaphors and similes, bristly with ideas and provocations, brazenly flout the rules of grammar, syntax and punctuation, determined to preserve their idiosyncrasy. Texturally, his stories are a feat, combining discordant elements to exhilarating effects: nihilism paired with political gusto; farce shot through with horror; realism grading into the weird and the surreal.