The Return of the Caravels - Paperback

by António Lobo Antunes (Author), Gregory Rabassa (Translator)

A powerful indictment of Portuguese colonialism and another literary tour de force from the pen of Antonio Lobo Antunes, "a master navigator of the human psyche . . . [with] the voice of Nabokov by way of Cortazar, Gogol by way of Dylan" (Los Angeles Times)

Called "hallucinatory and lyrical" (Publishers Weekly), The Return of the Caravels unfolds in Lisbon as Portugal's African colonies gain their independence in the mid-1970s. In a contemporary response to Camões conquest epic The Lusiads, Antunes imagines Vasco da Gama and other heroes of Portuguese explorations beached amid the detritus of the empire's collapse. Or is it the modern colonials--with their mixed-race heritage and uneasy place in the "fatherland"--who have somehow ended up in sixteenth-century Lisbon? As da Gama begins winning back ownership of Lisbon piece by piece in crooked card games, four hundred years of Portuguese history mingle--the caravels dock next to Iraqi oil tankers, and the slave trade rubs shoulders with the duty-free shops.

The Return of the Caravels is a startling and uncompromising look at one of Europe's great colonial powers, and how the era of conquest reshaped not just Portugal but the world.

Author Biography

António Lobo Antunes, "one of Portugal's pre-eminent writers" (New York Times), was born in Lisbon in 1942. The son of a physician, he too became a doctor and then spent four years in the Portuguese army during the Angolan war. His fictional "memoir" of that war, South of Nowhere, was internationally praised and followed by other widely translated and much-honored novels, including Act of the Damned, Fado Alexandrino, Explanation of the Birds, and The Natural Order of Things.