In the area of the Wolf | Culture | EUROtoday

They weren’t, though they had been, mere letters, phrases, strains, paragraphs, pages, books. They had been gems. António Lobo Antunes was extracting them from the underground mines of his fertile however merciless creativeness, the non-public first, the literary later, till they grew to become one, the one the place the nostalgia for what we did and the frustrations for what we are going to not have the ability to do come collectively.

In that decaying storage on Rúa Gonçalves Crespo within the heart of Lisbon, a storage transformed right into a painter’s studio, at the moment his cousin José, leaning over that draftsman’s desk, smoking a gypsies after one other, surrounded by pencils, nibs, jazz music and a jungle of devices, António – we had been associates, so António, or expensive António, and even rattling, António, what a foul factor you get while you need – the outdated alchemist from Benfica gave form to these intoxicating flowers of damage that had been popping out as if with out him wanting it, as a result of he already stated it, he pierced you with these huge blue eyes and launched you as if nothing had occurred: “My books make themselves, despite me, there is like an internal logic in them that escapes me.” Literature regardless of myselfhe favored to name her.

I used to be mendacity, after all. You solely needed to see these huge, landscape-shaped papers on which he wrote, just like the cardboard for handbook work however bigger, on which he smudged, on which he crossed out, on which he swore in Hebrew when he could not discover the phrase, the gem, these papers from which he left and returned, tirelessly, obsessively, amanuense with out schedules or limits, besides at six o’clock every afternoon, like that day in Lisbon, when he and his cousin went off to have a snack on the bar throughout the road for some time.

And so the phrases and the phrases and the strains and the paragraphs got here out, like scrolls merging with these of the umpteenth cigarette—“oh, oh, oh, I have to stop”—and so the novels got here out? Was {that a} novel? Or let’s name it these closed rooms, the colour of moss and the odor of camphor, of a haunted home during which rescued childhood, the brutalities of the colonial conflict (he was a captain within the Portuguese military in Angola) and its psychological penalties (Lobo was a psychiatrist, that helped), the omnipresence of demise and the persistence of reminiscence had been precedence elements.

Lobo didn’t put factors, he made paragraphs of a marathon dimension, sentences that appeared to haven’t any ending, however boy did they’ve one, demonstrating the non-obligatory nature of the punctuation mark known as “period” to restrict and shut, to condemn, to complete; his novels? They was round 500 pages, like that, and the titles had been a marvel of dreaminess, though they weren’t at all times theirs, from banal folks like Dylan Thomas or who is aware of who: Treatise on the passions of the soul, The pure order of issues, Exhortation to the crocodiles, Do not enter so rapidly into that darkish evening, It will not be midnight who needs…or instantly descriptive, see In the ass of the worlda prodigious e book from 1979 that we didn’t know in Spain—due to the nice arts of Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Martínez de Irujo, alias Jacobo Siruela, and his group of collaborators—till 2001.

It was in 2001 when the editor determined not solely to proceed publishing the nice books of this everlasting Nobel candidate who by no means gained the Nobel to the disgrace of the Nobel (an outdated custom of injustice, inform it to Borges, to Kafka, to Joyce, to Virginia Woolf, to Tolstoy, to Proust, hahahaha, if now a sure Trump even needs it (the one about Peace, I do not assume he is even acquainted with the literature factor), see if the model is devalued… I shit the Nobel, Lobo stated with out saying it. Just as he did not say that he could not deal with the opposite one. gloria Portuguese author, José Saramago, being clear and crystal clear that he couldn’t, and evidently vice versa.

Jacobo Siruela, we stated, not solely continued modifying Lobo Antunes, however in 2001 he determined to dedicate a library to him, Biblioteca Lobo Antunes, fantastically edited object books, gems of hundreds of thousands of pages, factories of enjoyment, sources of dreaming, disappointment of paper and so forth basically, by means of literature. regardless of myself (lie), monuments of literature. Then Lobo left Siruela and went to Random House, issues about life, issues about literature, issues about cash, in a signing that was fairly just like these of these soccer gamers who’ve grown up within the youth academy and who, as soon as they turn out to be stars, go to a wealthy superclub. It will not be clear that, past monetary issues, Lobo was completely happy with his choice. We won’t ever know.