Latest Review: Knowledge of Hell

Our latest review is the first of two Antonio Lobo Antunes reviews we’ll be posting over the next couple months. (The other being What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? forthcoming from W.W. Norton.)

I’ve been a fan of Antunes’s for years, and since this review is a bit mixed (it really is a great achievement, it’s just that some of his later books are stronger) I thought it would be useful to write out my personal ranking of the books of his that have been translated into English.

At the top of the list is Act of the Damned followed by The Inquisitors’ Manual, then The Natural Order of Things, The Return of the Caravels, and finally An Explanation of the Birds. Fado Alexandrino is also available, and I’m hoping to read this over the next few months. (It’s a big book that, unfortunately, is designed in such a way—oversized, text crammed on every page—that isn’t all that inviting . . . And speaking of unappealing things, I really wish this author page on Grove’s website had been redesigned sometime in the past decade. Yikes. Really doing an “obscure” foreign author no favors.)