An Explanation of the Birds     by António Lobo Antunes, Translated by Richard Zenith Original title: Explicação dos pássaros Original language: Portuguese Country: Portugal   Published by Grove Press Pub. Date: September 1995 Format: Paperback Dimensions: 0.74 x 8.17 x 5.50 in. ISBN: 0802134203 List Price: $11.00, £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.00 Published by Secker Pub. Date: 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 251 pages List Price: £7.99 Not available for ordering Published by Grove: NY Pub. Date: 1991 Pub. Place: USA Not available for ordering

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Lobo Antunes employs a colloquial, omnivorous language that digests trauma and black comedy and nourishes readers hungry for literature which meets life head on. An Explanation of the Birds is the work of a consummate technician, a shocking artist. He writes in the first or third person but always from within someone’s head — where past and present cohabit with hope and fear — and earns the right to psychological if not theological omniscience. His style must be read to be believed, and it compels belief.

Rui S., political historian, skips an academic conference and takes his Marxist second wife Marília away for a weekend — the book’s long chapters are Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday — to tell her it’s all over. He’s estranged from his rich father, his mother’s dying, his first wife plays on his nerves, his politics are compromised.

He remembers his father tenderly telling him tales to explain the birds, the birds that will peck at his corpse in Aveiro’s lagoon; ‘his father smoothed his hair against his temples and handed him the paper–knife. “I’m going to help you grasp the birds,” he said. “I’m going to help you understand them.”’

At the novel’s heart, long before his inexorable death, is Rui’s obituary which salutes, satirizes, mocks his life. Then Marília pre–empts him, leaves him before he can leave her. It’s a fine plot, a big top, a broad comedy, a bleak life ending when the spotlights are all on and whirling helter–skelter around the ring, the stands, the balcony, the ceiling, highlighting and forgetting countless objects and faces...

‘My tonic, Dona Almerinda,’ the blind man ordered in a voice without echo or inflection, searching with his vacant eyes for the long, transparent bottle that must be (he thinks) a kind of moonlight in his darkness.

‘One more beer,’ I said. ‘And some nuts please.’

My father leant towards you with an urbane smile on his plastic ageing–actor’s face: ‘So what is it you teach at the university?’

Dona Almerinda wove among the men with glass in hand, and I thought, ‘It’s not that he wants to make conversation, he just wants to make fun of you in front of the others.’ He thinks, ‘What sordid, venomous telescopes their smiles are.’