Act of the Damned     by António Lobo Antunes, Translated by Richard Zenith Original title: Auto dos danados Original language: Portuguese Country: Portugal   Published by Grove Press Pub. Date: October 1996 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 256 pages Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25 inches ISBN: 0802134769 List Price: $12.00, £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $12.00 Published by Secker & Warburg Pub. Date: 1993 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 246 pages ISBN: 0436201488 List Price: £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99

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Act of the Damned is a portrait of two things; the corrupt ruling class which fattened itself for decades under Salazar and of Portugal’s revolutionary year of 1974-75. We’re fed our picture of both things from within the bosom of a rich family trying to escape a fate worse than death — having its wealth seized by militant soldiers and peasants. As the family struggles to cut some quick, semi-legal deals to get their money out of the country, Antunes depicts a series of marvellously grotesque characters; one important member of the clan spends his whole life playing with his train set without realising it’s a toy while Old Grandpa has had sex with his daughter and his daughter’s daughter (who is also his daughter). The narrator, estranged politically and emotionally from this bunch, is one of literature’s few heroic dentists, a man under pressure who spends the novel trying to navigate past a cacophony of overweening receptionists, lovers on drugs and angry wives. Meanwhile the awkward squad down in the street want to make a revolution.

A very funny book in places, with a lot of genuinely striking description as, with a disgusted tone, Antunes drags skeletons out of cupboards and parades various unpalatable realities. Antunes himself is from a social background similar to the one he describes and some of his family apparently view his books as ‘acts of betrayal’.

‘We’d arrived in Évora an hour earlier and begun to decay with the rest of the two thousand-year-old town in the first hotel we found: a family operation with vinyl couches and a TV in the lobby and flags of many nations planted in a wooden disc on the counter, where a squint-eyed geriatric whose fingers were longer than conductor batons or lobster antennae handed out keys and had guests fill in cards. We dragged the luggage up two flights, the squint-eyes leading the way with a jittery cockroach’s energy, we entered the room, the old man’s snare-drum skipping faded out in the corridor along with his grumbling about the tip, and within a few minutes we’d discovered that the light bulb in the bedside lamp was burned out, that the window lock was jammed, that pressing the lever on the toilet made its empty stomach swallow the tank ball in vain, and that dozens of insects patrolled the baseboard, probing the cracks in the wood with their feelers.’ p101