The Return of the Caravels by António Lobo Antunes

The Return of the Caravels Reviews

• 
  Luís

  The author tells us a tragedy: Portugal, which in the 15th and 16th centuries was a great nation of discoverers and colonizers before the cruel 20th century sounded the end of the empire. And we saw the colonists return to a country they had forgotten, broken, lost, despised and sometimes abandoned, in a country free of dictatorship but losing its former grandeur forever. History and the present mingle intimately here. Chronologies intersect, and human paintings follow one another in a baroque language, handling the burlesque, cruel features, and zany and grating humour. Lobo Antunes is an excellent handler of images and words. Sometimes we even wonder if he is not abusing his talent a little.
• 
  withdrawn

  Another devastating book by António Lobo Antunes.
  
  António Lobo Antunes is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. With Return of the Caravels, he has written a novel as an exercise in anachronism, and he has done so in his usual chaotic, life denying/life confirming voice. I am astounded by the very fact that it occurred to Lobo Antunes to even write this book.
  
  I will not try to replay the book. I shall simply lay out some of the themes and characters. There is far too much going on here for me to attempt to do more.
  
  Let us begin with a character named Luís. He is a 'refugee' from one of the collapsed Portuguese colonies in Africa. It is the 1970s and Portuguese colonists and their descendants are escaping the mess they are leaving behind. Luís is bringing with him in the ship his father's corpse in a coffin for burial in Portugal. His father was arbitrarily shot shortly before the voyage.
  
  Upon landing in Lisbon, Luís sits upon his father's coffin on the dock, awaiting the later delivery of his furniture. It never comes. Finally, the dock officials become suspicious and look into to the coffin where they encounter a stinking, unsightly mess. They give Luís a sack to better transport his father and send him on his way to find a cemetery.
  
  While wandering aimlessly looking for an appropriate grave, Luís rests at an outdoor restaurant, his father tucked in beside him. Left alone, he picks up the waiter's pen and pad. He begins to write of his travels, in "eight verse stanzas". And slowly, not too slowly though, just enough to create a small flash, this reader's mind was enlightened. The man, Luís, is none other than Luís de Camões, creator of The Lusiads, Portugal's great 16th century poem of discovery.
  
  And Luis is not alone from Portugal's golden age of exploration. Travelling with him on the ship was a card shark who we soon discover to be Vasco da Gama, great sea captain and explorer. Da Gama quickly sets about trying to win back Portugal one piece at a time from the post-revolutionary socialist government of modern Portugal. Ostensibly, he is doing so to help his friend, Dom Manoel, Portugal's king who sent his sailors out on the oceans to establish the empire. Unfortunately, the two are picked up and incarcerated in an asylum, despite the protests of the King that, "all of this crap belongs to me."
  
  And this is where the brilliance of the book becomes evident. Lobo Antunes has brought together the beginnings and turns of the Portuguese empire. The glorious dreams of the beginning are crossed with the rotting remains as they wash up in modern Portugal. As Lobo Antunes makes clear in most of his books, those dreams of empire could only lead to racism, oppression, corruption and collapse for both those who were colonized and those who did the colonizing.
  
  While we encounter 16th century caravels in Lisbon's harbour side by side with Saudi oil tankers, we meet many other luminaries of the golden age: Fernão Mendes Pintos, Manoel de Sousa Sepúlveda (Indies), and Diogo Cão. My favourite is the early pharmacologist Garcia de Orta, who takes de Camões into his home in exchange for the contents of the sack. Luís's father henceforth becomes fertilizer for de Orta's many plants that he grows for the production of medicines. De Orta also has a wife and many children, as well as living with his ailing father-in-law. Eventually the more aggressive of the plants gobble up the old man and the children while the silent wife wanders off.
  
  The book is both delightful and a lesson in the horrors of history. Portugal was doomed by its own success, its dreams of wealth washed up on its shores as so much flotsam. Beware America.
  
  I would recommend this book to anyone who has a degree in Portuguese history or the patience to research on Wikipedia. No big deal really. Buy the book and warm up Google. It is well worth the effort. Brilliant.
• 
  Paula Fialho Silva

  Gostei imenso deste livro mas não é um livro que recomendo a todas as pessoas. É pequenino, li-o em menos de 24h mas a escrita é densa e recheada de referências da história e cultura portuguesas.
  Gostei imenso de ver as personagens da época gloriosa dos descobrimentos no mundo dos retornados das ex-colónias. Para mim, funcionou muito bem e representou na perfeição a desconstrução do império português.
  A escrita, apesar de densa, tem muitas partes humorísticas, sarcásticas até. E isso, agradou-me imenso!
• 
  Teresa

  Do reyno de Portugal, no século XVI, partiram as naus do cais de Lixboa, levando homens à descoberta de mundos e glórias. No século XX chegam aviões ao aeroporto de Lixboa trazendo esses mesmos homens, que regressam vencidos de Loanda, da África liberta pela revolução dos cravos.
  Pedro Álvares Cabral, Luís de Camões, Diogo Cão, São Francisco Xavier, Manuel de Sousa Sepúlveda, Bartolomeu Dias, D. Manuel, Vasco da Gama, são algumas das dezenas de personagens históricas, transformadas em figuras grotescas, que se cruzem num romance alucinante de situações caricatas e hilariantes.
  
  Lobo Antunes, mestre das palavras, parodia sem pudores, os heróis da nossa história - os conquistadores, retornados sem honra e riquezas, para um país que não os quer, nem lhes reconhece qualquer valor.
  Provavelmente Pessoa estava enganado e nem tudo valha a pena, por maior que seja a alma....
  
  Mais do que um romance, As Naus, poderá ser lido como uma grande reflexão sobre a nossa História, os nossos heróis, a emigração...
  
  Um pequeno exemplo para ilustrar o conteúdo desta maravilha:
  "Foi então que topámos com um grande aparato militar de castelhanos protegendo uma tenda alumiada de barraca de feira, centenas de estandartes, bandeiras e cozinhas de campanha, cirurgiões que amolavam bisturis e ilusionistas que divertiam a tropa, e uma sentinela nos informou que o rei Filipe se reunira com os seus marechais na rulote do Estado-Maior a combinar a invasão de Portugal, porque D. Sebastião, aquele pateta inútil de sandálias e brinco na orelha, sempre a lamber uma mortalha de haxixe, tinha sido esfaqueado num bairro de droga de Marrocos por roubar a um maricas inglês, chamado Oscar Wilde, um saquinho de liamba."
  
• 
  Marina

  When I begun reading this novel I had little knowledge of Portuguese history, beyond the fact that it had once been one of the great colonial empires of Europe. I soon realised that I had better educate myself at least as regards the basics since the main theme of the novel is the dissolution of this empire. Following the Carnation Revolution in 1974 Portugal abandoned its colonies in Africa. One effect of this was the return home of more than half a million Portuguese who used to live there. One can only imagine both the economic and social impact on a small and now poor country like Portugal.
  
  And so with the aid of a surreal narrative full of spatial shifts between Lisbon and the colonies, where the present and the past are conflated, we follow Vasco da Gama and the other heroes of Portugal’s age of exploration as they make their undignified way home. A hallucinatory stream of images that are like the splintered fragments of a mirror, builds up an atmosphere of lurid squalor, decomposition and corruption.
  
  In an age where the great colonial empires are no longer revered but rather questioned as to the ethics behind them and the evil they helped bring on other people we find the great heroes reduced to roles we tend to associate with the dregs of society: pimps, paedophiles, drunkards, gamblers and charlatans. Where they so great after all, since they were complicit in the creation of something nowadays regarded as evil? Did the complicity of the real ‘retornados’, with which apparently they were stigmatised, justify the hostile welcome they received on their return to the homeland?
  
  I have deliberately avoided giving examples of images encountered in the novel for all that they were powerful and striking (on occasion even funny). In the absence of a coherent plot I feel that the greatness of this book consists of this gradual building up of an atmosphere and to give anything away would in this case constitute a spoiler. But I would encourage anybody who is not afraid of a difficult post modern voice to give this novel a try. It is well worth the effort.
• 
  Katia N

  It is compared to Cortazar, Gogol, Marquez etc. None of those comparison stands, in my opinion. If anything it reminded me Celine. And later i learned that Antunes is aspired by Celine and it shines through this book. The difference is I found Celine too detached. This is much warmer, but with the same sense of atmosphere.
  
  It is surreal and hyperreal at the same time. Imagine all the heroes of the era of great discoveries (15th century) are coming back to Lisbon at the time of unravelling of the Portuguese colonial empire in the 70s of the 20th century. Who are they? The great travellers or the colonial returnees? They end up leaving on the margins of the Portuguese capital which they do not recognise. Vasco da Gama is playing cards and winning the bits of the city with the King of Portugal. Camoes is returning from Africa with his dead father in a casket which he drags around. He starts to write very different "Lustrads". Pedro Alvares Cabral (who was the first from the Europeans discovering Brazil) is loosing his mind and hunting for a job. There others.
  
  The writing is totally hallucinatory. Antunes can start a sentence in the 15th century and finish it in the 20th. He can start it as a third person and finish as a first. The caravels are appeared at the port next to the oil tankers. We follow the characters between Africa and the slums of Lisbon, never totally sure were we are.
  
  One need to like this style to enjoy it. It worked for me wonderfully. Bitter, sad story, marvellously told. It reminds me that the history is never linear as we want it to be.
• 
  Isabel

  Contrariamente a outros do Lobo Antunes, não consegui sentir qualquer interesse por este livro. Porventura será porque ando cansada e cheia de sono. A narrativa não me fascinou. Achei alguma graça ao misturar de diferentes fases históricas ao longo do livro, mas nada para além disso. Confesso que nas últimas páginas até passei os olhos de maneira desatenta: já estava farta.
  
  Em suma, ou é porque ando cansada; ou não ando numa fase Lobo Antunes; ou simplesmente não gosto do livro.
• 
  Joe Larkin

  In hell this will be read to you in an isolated room with Miley Cyrus as the narrator
• 
  Roger Brunyate

  "What century do you think we're living in?"
  

  …the taxi dropped us off beside the Tagus on a strip of sand called Belém, according to what could be read on the nearby train stop with a scale on one side and a urinal on the other, and he caught sight of hundreds of people and teams of oxen that were bringing stone blocks for a huge building, led by squires in scarlet habits, indifferent to the taxis, the vans with American divorcées and Spanish priests and the nearsighted Japanese who were taking pictures of everything, chatting in their sharp-beaked samurai tongue.

  This is from the first page of this extraordinary novel. Much later in the book, one character asks another, "What century do you think we're living in?" He might well ask, because in this vision of the port of Lixbon (as it is spelled here), Iraqi oil-tankers tie up next to fifteenth-century caravels, "with admirals in lace cuffs leaning on the rail and seamen up on the masts preparing the sails for the open sea that smelled of nightmare and gardenias."
  
  I have read only one Lobo Antunes book before, his
  The Land at the End of the World (a sanitized version of its obscene Portuguese title). That was a quasi-autobiographical novel about his posting as a young doctor to Angola in the early 1970s, his witnessing of atrocities committed by his countrymen in a futile attempt to stem the war for independence, and his utter desolation when he returned home. The present novel, written a decade later, is also about the return of disillusioned colonists from Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Goa, following the collapse of Portugal's colonial empire. Lobo Antunes' original title translates simply as "The Ships," but translator Gregory Rabassa's version, "The Return of the Caravels," is brilliant—as is his coruscating response to the mingled color and squalor in the author's writing throughout.
  
  Why? Because it puts its finger on the genius of Lobo Antunes' concept: to treat the return of these degraded twentieth-century colonists as though it were the homecoming of those great explorers of the Age of Discovery who first opened up these countries in the fifteenth century. The aged, disease-ridden expatriates who barter everything for a cheap plane ticket home bear noble names such as Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan. But when they return, they find themselves forced to take rooms in bars and bordellos while earning a few pennies as card-sharps or selling their mulatto wives as whores. Lobo Antunes' writing is dazzling, jumping even in the course of a sentence between centuries, from glitter to pollution, from third- to first-person points of view. It is often funny, as in the description of an effete Portuguese King "knifed in a drug-dealing neighborhood in Morocco for robbing an English fairy named Oscar Wilde of a bag of pot." But make no mistake, this is a novel written in white-hot anger at the colonial assumptions that have soiled an entire nation, and the atrocities that the author has seen at first hand.
  
  Five stars? It's tempting. Lobo Antunes' power of sustaining this surreal nightmare at such intensity for 200-some pages—and to harness it to such a cause—is utterly amazing. I can see why many thought that if a Nobel Prize was to go to a Portuguese writer, it should have been to him, not José Saramago. But as a reading experience, I could not go so high. There is no plot, no characters to whom one can easily relate, no movement towards a conclusion other than the further curdling of contrasts into a pustulent outbreak of baroque boils. Towards the end, I had the curious sensation of reading in a waking dream, where the author's language merged with my own nightmare imagination with no distinction between them. I am glad to have read this masterpiece, certainly. But I am even more glad to have finished.
• 
  Jim

  You would have to know a lot more about Portugal and its colonies than I do to give this novel by
  António Lobo Antunes the appreciation it deserves. Imagine Lisbon (here called Lixbon) intermingling with the detritus of its former African colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau) and its famous figures from history (Francis Xavier, Diogo Cao, Fernando Pessoa) and forever changed by the experience of colonialism.
  
  
  The Return of the Caravels is a good title for this postmodernist melange: The explorers' ships have all returned to the banks of the Tagus with strange African diseases. In a rich literary stew, Lobo Antunes wields a giant wooden spoon:

  On Sunday mornings, if the sun was shining, the king Dom Manoel would blow his horn out on the street inside an ancient rusty Ford with a convertible top, and the neighbor women, half awake in their nightgowns, would peep out at the monarch with his tinfoil crown on his head and wearing an overblouse with the sleeves rolled up, waving at Vasco da Gama with his scepter, ordering him to come down so they could be on their way along the Marginal to talk about the Orient with a crippled bouncing of springs, enveloped in spirals of dark smoke from the engine.

  If it were anyone other than Gregory Rabassa translating the book, I do not think it would have come out anywhere near as well.
  
  This is one of those books you can't stop to look up facts: You have to forge on ahead and see the rich variety of persons, places, and situations that Lobo Antunes throws at you. In the end, you don't know all the details, but the salient facts are more than evident.
  
  
• 
  Kicia93

  Certainly a must for anyone who loves Portugal. The soul of Portugal is what the author understands very well, and he renders it very well in this novel where the country's past and present meet and mingle, heroes of Portuguese history - explorers, navigators, kings, writers - return and wander through the streets of modern Lisbon, the threat of Spanish invasion is as present as ever, and ex-colonialists come back to the "realme" from Guinea or Angola, stupefied by the Empire's collapse. This is not only an original idea for a novel, this is truly the essence of modern Portugal, permeated with mythology, whose people like to contemplate the proud historical past and are said to still await the return of king Dom Sebastiao, centuries after he disappeared mysteriously... But the book depicts these myths and these people in an ugly or at least very melancholy way. People are old and ugly, their bodies and minds tired; women are whores or crazy, men are past their prime, sex is everywhere but it is ugly and dirty, the past grandeur of the country is no more. The final image of a crowd of tuberculosis-eaten patients sitting and watching the sea in vain for Dom Sebastiao's return to the kingdom is a very pessimistic though powerful allegory of contemporary Portugal.
  
  Apart from interesting narrative inventions and tricks such as mingling past and present or switching the narration (hence also the perspective) - sometimes in the middle of a sentence - from the 3rd to the 1st person, the book deserves a special mention for its beautiful musical language, for the long, almost hypnotic phrases and sentences that make the reader really dive into the scene; and for the imaginative quality of descriptions that retain attention and somewhat amaze (how about the calm and factual description of the evolution of carnivorous plants in a Lisbon flat, devouring gradually its inhabitants!). So magic mingles with reality just like myths mingle with history.
  
  To nonaficionados of Portugal, however, the book might seem rather opaque and puzzling; it might be too "hermetic". I am not sure this kind of literary "nationalism" appeals to me; it is somewhat stifling, non-universal, and it appears to be a sort of national martyrology. Also for this reason it certainly requires a lot of concentration as it is not easy at the beginning to enter this very peculiar literary universe. But once one is in it, one cannot but be fascinated even if one doesn't like (or understand!) everything.
• 
  Ben Jaques-Leslie

  Don't know if I can say that I liked this book. There are certainly many, many attractive turns of phrase. In fact, most of the book felt like an extended exercise in interesting word choice to made a vision of a wild and mad post-colonial Portugal. His descriptions are fantastic, but if there is a narrative, it is completely hidden beneath so many beautify chosen words.
• 
  Rui Gel

  Numa frase digo: sejam bem vindos à puta da loucura. Obrigado, António.
• 
  Jim Green

  Antunes makes the reader understand how it must have felt like it for the population, for the returning Portuguese and for the people from the former colonies during this turmoil of change. Antunes' words paint pictures of the mind that are intense and vivid which offers the reader a pleasant read.
• 
  Samuel Andrade

  à espera de um cavalo impossível.
• 
  Joana

  Custa-me imenso admitir mas acho que não percebi nadinha deste livro! Português maravilhoso, recheado de expressões deliciosas, mas se me perguntarem de que fala o livro? Pois não sei... sei que fala de um Diogo Cão, Luís de Camões, e umas outras quantas personagens da nossa história, enquadradas num contexto diferente, que às vezes no remete para o presente outras para o passado... e pouco mais.
• 
  Bernardo Faria

  Como não amar este escritor!
• 
  António Lima

  Que maravilha (re) descobrir o escritor António Lobo Antunes dos inícios antes de, digamos, se Loboantunizar aos extremos. Que brilhante história das misérias dos "retornados" que se misturam às glórias e mitos do "Esplendor de Portugal".
• 
  Gonçalo Ferreira

  Entrevista de Isabel Lucas para o jornal Público
  António Lobo Antunes: “Quando é que eu fui feliz?”
  19 de Outubro de 2018
  Isabel Lucas: As Naus (1988)...
  António Lobo Antunes:Tenho dúvidas quanto a esse livro. Tem um ar caricatural, um bocado carnavalesco. Passei a instrução primária a fazer bigodes nos retratos dos reis e dos navegadores por quem, no fundo, tenho enorme admiração. Afonso de Albuquerque era um grande escritor. D. Duarte é um escritor espantoso! A minha primeira paixão foi Fernão Lopes. Se tivesse de escolher um escritor em português, escolhia Fernão Lopes. Comecei por ler D. Duarte, porque tem um capítulo espantoso sobre a depressão.
  
  No livro:
  "Uma máquina de vender chocolates e cigarros estremecia de febre a um canto, vomitando caramelos após uma complicada digestão de moedas,(...)"
  
  "(...) entravam e saíam nos cretones do palácio do governo, pisando com desdém as lajes do poder."
  
  "(...) e perguntou-me do cimo das condecorações de gordura do casaco,(...)"
• 
  Vanessa Silva

  PT: Comecei a ler este livro sem espectativas, porque não conheço o autor. Não posso dizer que tenha gostado da história. Atrevo-me a dizer que é por causa de livros assim que a leitura nacional Portuguesa perde muito o encanto. É uma história confusa, fantasiosa e que só conseguimos entender tudo aquilo no último parágrafo do livro. Mas acredito que a meio os leitores queiram desistir. Sendo que o autor é médico psiquiatra, não me admira que o foco do livro é realmente a insanidade mental.
  
  EN: I started reading this book without any expectations because I do not know the author. I can not say I liked the story. I dare to say that it is because of books like this one, that Portuguese national reading loses the charm, a lot. It is a confusing, fanciful story and we can only understand it, in the last paragraph of the book. But I think half readers want to give up. Since the author is a medical psychiatrist, no wonder the focus of the book is really mental insanity.
• 
  Edith

  This historical novel from Portugal was written by one of the country's most important contemporary authors. It's a difficult read with many aspects of surrealism and magical realism, but through and through Portuguese. The colonial history from its beginning in the sixteenth century until its end in 1974 is merged into this short novel revolving around a good dozen of characters beyond the boundaries of time, among them impressive figures like Vasco da Gama and King Dom Manoel as well as Saint Francis Xavier. But their modern world is nightmarish and they aren't the good heroes from the history books...
  
  To know more
  click here to read my review on
  Edith's Miscellany
• 
  Massiel

  This is not an easy book to read if you don´t have previous portuguese history knowledge. But don´t let that stop you. Reading "The return of the caravels" is an amazing experience and will leave you breathless. The images Antunes creates will haunt you and mesmerize you, and the deep psychological undertones undress Portugal´s darkest sides. If you, like me, are fond of literature that gives you a little extra, like Ernesto Sábato or Jorge Luis Borges, this is definetly a book for you. Needless to say, I loved it.
• 
  Lumissa

  Levottomana menneisyyden ja nykyisyyden välillä lainehtivan kirjan kerronnan rytmissä oli jotain perin vetävää. Pursia kulkee satamasta toiseen, eikä välitiloissa roikkuviin henkilöihin malteta jäädä pitkäksi aikaa.
  
  Kirja kiinnosti aluksi, mutta lopulta siihen oli liian vaikea päästä kärryille, pikkuisen liian maalaileva ja taiteellisuutta tavoitteleva kerronta sai ajatukset harhailemaan nopeasti. Sisälle pääsyä varten olisi lisäksi ollut syytä tuntea kirjan hahmogalleria, joka koostuu Portugalin historian kuuluisista miehistä 1300-luvulta asti eteenpäin.
• 
  MICHELLE CHICK

  I usually love historical fiction as a means of learning the subject I liked least in school. If you do not already known the history of the Portuguese empire, this is not the novel from which to learn it. The timeline is fluid, to say the least. I'm pretty sure there are mad ramblings buried in the very poetic images painted across sentences that run on for 10 or more lines of text. I feel as though the author were attempting to write a poem in novel form.
• 
  Piotr

  Nie, 3 gwiazdek nie dam. To mogłaby być świetna książka ale nijak nie jest. ALA jest obdarzony wielkim wyczuciem ironii i niebywałym talentem do skojarzeń, gier słownych, błyskotliwych zdań itp. Ale ta książka ni cholery nie udowadnia, że to jest najwybitniejszy żyjący portugalski pisarz .. no, wierzyć się nie chce.
• 
  Bernardo Moura

  "As Naus" é uma obra que nos transporta através de mil e uma formas de degredo e condição humana ao seu melhor nível. As imagens de metáforas, eufemismos e hipérboles atropelam-se umas às outras na criação de uma envolvência profunda com o leitor que é muitas vezes confusa e macabra, mas que de outra forma não seria possível.
• 
  Jakub Marek

  I guess you need a degree from Portuguese history to actually appreciate this book as it (allegedly) keeps throwing subtle references and hints at you. Of course, they probably get lost in all the weird metaphors and endlessly meandering sentences... But if the author wanted to show you the confusion during and after the revolution, he definitely did it - it's a hella confusing book.
  
• 
  Anna

  Very good presented halucinations - I liked it more than
  Gabriel García Márquez's magical realism novels. Great.