About Face

 Wednesday, July 02, 2025

About Face

 July 2  This morning I wrote a complaint to Dalkey Archive about Antunes because last night I found a piece from 2009 where his biographer said he was lost to dementia.  Was that a premature diagnosis and assumption.

In this morning's WashPo a rave review for this novel by Morten Høi Jensen (who has a new book out on the contradictions of The Magic Mountain coming out in October.  Danish.  So given his help in this review I suppose I will continue on in Midnight.  

here is his piece ---  

António Lobo Antunes’s novels are inventions of inflamed interiority. [good phrase there ]   They defy summation with a shrug. If our inner lives cannot be easily summarized, Antunes seems to say, then why should a novel? His sentences, long and unpunctuated, often accommodate several voices at once. And yet this polyphony belies his basic readability; it may not always be clear what is going on, or who is saying what, but the effect is nevertheless intensely absorbing. Yes, one thinks, this is indeed what our minds are made of: a commotion of thoughts, voices, memories half-remembered or wholly made-up, intrusions and evasions.   [Yes this is the experience and the pleasure.]

Antunes, often (and rightfully) listed as a Nobel Prize contender, is arguably Portugal’s greatest living writer, the author of more than 30 novels whose long roster of admirers has included über-critics George Steiner and Harold Bloom. Born in Lisbon in 1942, Antunes trained as a doctor and later practiced psychiatry. Not long after graduating from medical school, he was drafted to serve as a medic in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-1974), a long, costly and ultimately futile attempt by dictator António de Oliveira Salazar’s to retain Portugal’s colonies in Africa. The experience strongly marked Antunes, who has repeatedly returned to the war in his fiction, not least because of the public silence that followed after the Salazar regime was overthrown in 1974. “There was a kind of unspeakable culpability in Portugal,” Antunes has said. “Everyone just wanted to forget.” 

The narrator of “Midnight Is Not in Everyone’s Reach,” the latest novel by Antunes to be translated into English, also longs for oblivion, though of a more permanent kind. Set over the course of a single late-summer weekend in 2011, the novel follows the narrator, a schoolteacher, to the house on the Portuguese coast where she spent summers as a child, and where, significantly, her oldest brother drowned himself in the ocean 40 years before. “I wasn’t eleven anymore, I was fifty-two, or rather here I was eleven and fifty-two,” the narrator reflects. “I’ve come to say goodbye to this house, or to my older brother, or to myself.” It may also be significant that 1971, the apparent year of the brother’s death, was the same year Antunes was sent to Angola during the war.

These few details are the buoys the reader is given to navigate the novel’s stormy narrative. The first sentence opens, “I awoke in the middle of the night certain that the ocean was calling me through the closed shutters,” and doesn’t close, properly speaking, until Page 32, with the conclusion of the first chapter. (The novel’s three parts, one for each day of the weekend, consist of 10 chapters each). But unlike long-sentence soliloquists like W. G. Sebald or Javier Marías, Antunes’s sentences are noisily peopled, and his translator, Elizabeth Lowe, is right to compare them to jazz, “with improvisations that interrupt the narrative flow, and refrains that mark the melody,” as she puts it in her translator’s note.

A single page of “Midnight Is Not in Everyone’s Reach” might therefore consist of three or more characters’ voices and take place in as many different points in time and be interrupted by a line of dialogue or the narrator’s own reflections. Admittedly, this absence of grammatical and narrative convention requires that readers be on their toes; for the first few pages, it may seem difficult to follow, but as with jazz it creates its own subtle rhythms over time, so that the reader eventually begins to nod along, more and more deeply engrossed.

[again, "nod" is the right word choice here!]

As the weekend at the beach house unfolds, we realize that the narrator is taking stock of her life, reading the balance sheet and moving toward a last attempt at justice or requital, gradually revealing the more specific details of her biography. We learn that she has had both a miscarriage and a mastectomy, that her marriage to her husband is falling apart and that for some time she has been engaged in an affair with an older, female colleague. Mostly, however, we learn about her family when she was growing up: her unemployed, alcoholic father and unaffectionate mother, the oldest brother who dies by suicide, a sadistic older brother who never recovers from the war in Angola, and a deaf brother who constantly draws out and repeats the tongue twister “Sheee saaills seeea sheells.”

There are memories returned to obsessively, like wounds: the oldest brother letting the narrator sit on the fender of his bicycle; the father always disappearing into the pantry to drink from his arsenal of bottles; the mother always complaining to someone or other: “Do you see the cross I bear?” Other memories — “the amount of junk, buried inside us, that resuscitates […] bringing more ruins along with it,” the narrator muses — surface unbidden, and still others don’t belong to the narrator at all: Each of the novel’s three parts concludes with chapters narrated by someone else.  

{this detail I had not realized} [is it really accurate?]

Over nearly 575 pages, this relentless probing of memory also demonstrates something of its desperate futility. Powerless to change the past, the narrator doubts and ponders, argues and accuses, remembers insults and settles scores: “What have I done?”; “why do people grow apart”; “you were the one who killed him, mother”; “where did you go, all of you.” And to what end? Only to long for “peace, and a ceiling of ocean in which the waves move without hurting.” 

Antunes’s prose, viscous, metaphorical and baroque in his earlier novels, is made here of a more tentative, airier substance, filled with the surges, flickers and confusions of consciousness: “Death, I’m not afraid of dying, I’m only afraid of suffering, of pain, what a lie, I’m afraid of the Alto da Vigia, and my body, my body falling and not of suffering or pain, it’s death that terrifies me, no older brother waiting for me in the water, I helpless and nevertheless I have to do it not for my older brother, for me.”

In this elegy for a family, or for the family that could have been, Antunes masterfully evokes the obsessive pull of family life, the peculiar intensity of its joys and miseries. “We had missed being happy by a thread,” the narrator thinks at one point, “what did we do wrong.” Readers should not be put off by the narrative disorder and paucity of plot; “Midnight Is Not in Everyone’s Reach” is fiction of the highest order.

Morten Høi Jensen is the author of “The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain,” which will be published in October.