Caderno - António Lobo Antunes

A soaring, symphonic epic by the Portuguese master novelist, considered to be the "heir to Conrad and Faulkner" (George Steiner). The razor-thin line between reality and madness is transgressed in this Faulknerian masterpiece, António Lobo Antunes´s first novel to appear in English in five years. What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?, set in the steamy world of Lisbon´s demimonde - a nightclub milieu of scorching intensity and kaleidoscopic beauty, a baleful planet populated by drag queens, clowns, and drug addicts - is narrated by Paolo, the son of Lisbon´s most legendary transvestite, who searches for his own identity as he recalls the harrowing death of his father, Carlos; the life of Carlos´s lover, Rui, a heroin addict and suicide; as well as the other denizens of this hallucinatory world. Psychologically penetrating, pregnant with literary symbolism, and deeply sympathetic in its depiction of society´s dregs, Lobo Antunes´s novel ventriloquizes the voices of the damned in a poetic masterwork that recalls Joyce´s Ulysses with a dizzying farrago of urban images few readers will forget.

On the tenth anniversary of the return of their battalion from Mozambique, five men attempt to rekindle the fraternal bond that helped them survive the colonial war that was Portugal´s Vietnam. In turn, they tell the stories of their lives before, during, and after the revolution that overthrew the long-lived Salazar dictatorship.

The Natural Order of Things is a tale of two families and the secrets that bind them. The voices ofAntunes´ characters - an army officer being tortured in prison on charges of conspiracy; an elderly man, once a miner in Mozambique, now reduced to dreams of "flying underground"; a diabetic teenage girl and the middle-aged husband she despises; the officer´s illegitimate sister, locked away to haunt the house like Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre - create a portrait of a disintegrating Portugal, a personal political history that attains the brilliance and surreality of Elias Canetti and Nikolai Gogol.

Like a Portuguese version of As I Lay Dying, but more ambitious, António Lobo Antunes´s eleventh novel chronicles the decadence not just of a family but of an entire society - a society morally and spiritually vitiated by four decades of totalitarian rule. In this his masterful novel, António Lobo Antunes, "one of the most skillful psychological portraitists writing anywhere, renders the turpitude of an entire society through an impasto of intensely individual voices." (The New Yorker)The protagonist and anti-hero Senhor Francisco, a powerful state minister and personal friend of Salazar, expects to be named prime minister when Salazar is incapacitated by a stroke in 1968. Outraged that the President (Admiral Américo Tomás) appoints not him but Marcelo Caetano to the post, Senhor Francisco retreats to his farm in Setúbal, where he vaguely plots a coup with other ex-ministers and aged army officers who feel they´ve been snubbed or forgotten. But it´s younger army officers who in 1974 pull off a coup, the Revolution of the Flowers (so called since no shots were fired, carnations sticking out of the butts of the insurgents´ rifles), ending 42 years of dictatorship. Senhor Francisco, more paranoid than ever, accuses all the workers at his farm of being communists and sends them away with a brandished shotgun, remaining all alone - a large but empty shadow of his once seeming omnipotence - to defend a decrepit farm from the figments of his imagination.When the novel opens, Senhor Francisco is no longer at the farm but in a nursing home in Lisbon with a bedpan between his legs, having suffered a stroke that left him largely paralyzed. No longer able to speak, he mentally reviews his life and loves. His loves? In fact the only woman he really loved was his wife Isabel, who left him early on, when their son João was just a tiny boy. Francisco takes up with assorted women and takes sexual advantage of the young maids on the farm, the steward's teenage daughter, and his secretaries at the Ministry, but he can never get over the humiliation of Isabel having jilted him for another man. Many years later he spots a commonplace shop girl, named Milá, who resembles his ex-wife. He sets the girl and her mother up in a fancy apartment, makes her wear Isabel´s old clothes, and introduces her to Salazar and other government officials as his wife, and everyone goes along with the ludicrous sham, because everything about Salazar´s Estado Novo ("New State") was sham - from the rickety colonial "empire" in Africa to the emasculate political leaders in the home country, themselves monitored and controlled by the secret police.Once the system of shams tumbles like a castle of cards, Francisco´s cuckoldry glares at him with even greater scorn than before, and all around him lie casualties. Milá and her mother return to their grubby notions shop more hopeless than ever, because the mother is dying and Milá is suddenly a spinster without prospects. The steward, with no more farm to manage, moves his family into a squalid apartment and gets a job at a squalid factory. The minister´s son, raised by the housekeeper, grows up to be good-hearted but totally inept, so that his ruthless in-laws easily defraud him of his father´s farm, which they turn into a tourist resort. The minister´s daughter, Paula, whom he had by the cook and who was raised by a childless widow in another town, is ostracized after the Revolution because of who her father was, even though she hardly ever knew him.Isabel, the ex-wife, also ends up all alone, in a crummy kitchenette in Lisbon, but she isn´t a casualty of Senhor Francisco or of society or of a political regime but of love, of its near impossibility. Disillusioned by all the relationships she had with men, she stoutly resists Francisco´s ardent attempts to win her back, preferring solitude instead.We have to go to the housekeeper, Titina, this novel´s most compelling character, to find hope of salvation, however unlikely a source she seems. Unattractive and uneducated, Titina never had a romantic love relationship, though she secretly loved her boss, who never suspected. She ends up, like him, in an old folks´ home, and like him she spends her days looking back and dreaming of returning to the farm in its heyday. Old age is a great equalizer. And yet the two characters are not equal. Titina retains her innocence. But it´s not the innocence of helpless inability - the case of João, Francisco´s son - nor is it the pathetic innocence of Romeu, the emotionally and mentally undeveloped co-worker by whom Paula has a son. Titina isn't helpless or ingenuous, and she isn´t immune to the less than flattering human feelings of jealousy, impatience and anger. But she never succumbs to baser instincts. She knows her worth and cultivates it. She is a proud woman, but proud only of what she really is and what she has really accomplished in life.At one level (and it operates at many), The Inquisitors´ Manual is an inquiry into the difficult coexistence of self-affirmation and tenderness toward others. Their correct balance, which equals human dignity, occurs in the housekeeper.

"The Splendor of Portugal"´s four narrators are members of a once well-to-do family whose plantation was lost in the Angolan War of Independence; the matriarch of this unhappiest of clans and her three adult children speak in a nightmarish, remorseless gush to give us the details of their grotesque family life. Like a character out of Faulkner´s decayed south, the mother clings to the hope that her children will come back, save her from destitution, and restore the family´s imagined former glory. The children, for their part, haven´t seen each other in years, and in their isolation are tormented by feverish memories of Angola. The vitriol and self-hatred of the characters know no bounds, for they are at once victims and culprits, guilty of atrocities committed in the name of colonialism as well as the cruel humiliations and betrayals of their own kin. Antunes again proves that he is the foremost stylist of his generation, a fearless investigator into the worst excesses of the human animal.

Like his creator, the narrator of this novel is a psychiatrist who loathes psychiatry, a veteran of the despised 1970s colonial war waged by Portugal against Angola, a survivor of a failed marriage, and a man seeking meaning in an uncaring and venal society. The reader joins Antunes on a journey both real and phantasmagorical as he travels by car from a vacation in the Algarve back to his hated work as a psychiatrist at a Lisbon mental institution. In the course of one long day and evening, he carries on an imaginary conversation with his daughter Joanna, observes with surreal vision the bleak countryside of his nation, recalls the horrors of his involuntary role in the suppression of Angolan independence, and curses the charlatanism of contemporary psychiatric "advances" that destroy rather than heal.

Este quarto livro de crónicas de António Lobo Antunes é uma selecção de 79 crónicas publicadas na revista Visão. Nestes pequenos textos, António Lobo Antunes evoca lugares, personagens, retratos do quotidiano e memórias de infância. Não morreste na cama mas morreste entre lençóis de metal horrivelmente amachucados na auto-estrada de Cascais para Lisboa e a gente ali, diante do teu caixão, tão tristes. Começa assim a quarta crónica deste livro e é um bom exemplo da intensidade dramática de alguns textos que sendo muito mais acessíveis ao público do que os seus romances não descuram uma forte componente literária. E com uma narrativa que nos surpreende sempre pela genialidade como junta as palavras para formar cada frase, António Lobo Antunes levanos da tristeza à alegria e arranca-nos sorrisos pela forma como se ri de si próprio e das pequenas fraquezas de cada um de nós e que "apanha" e retrata como ninguém.

Relato dos últimos quatro dias da vida de Rui S. Rui visita a mãe que está a morrer de cancro numa clínica em Lisboa; parte, em seguida, com a mulher, Marília, para um congresso em Tomar, mas, a meio da viagem, muda de ideias e seguem para uma estalagem em Aveiro, à beira da ria, para uma estadia a sós. Na realidade, o seu propósito é falar a Marília do desejo de separação, mas acaba por ser a mulher que lhe comunica, ao terceiro dia, a vontade de se separar dele. No domingo, Rui sai cedo do quarto da estalagem para passear na ria enquanto a mulher regressa sozinha a Lisboa. Horas depois, rui suicida-se nas margens do Vouga, olhando os bandos de pássaros.

Durante uma viagem de carro realizada no final das férias de Verão, o médico psiquiatra, que viaja sozinho, ocupa o tempo que medeia entre a partida de Albufeira e a chegada à Praia das Maçãs (uma tarde e parte de uma noite) na observação do espaço percorrido, em considerações sobre a sua vida presente, e na rememoração de momentos marcantes da sua existência. Apresentando-se inicialmente como um longo monólogo interior (numa oscilação constante entre a primeira e terceira pessoas gramaticais), ganha contornos de diálogo quando o narrador enceta uma conversa fantasmática com a sua filha Joana.

A Vida de uma grande família portuguesa em 1975. quando, em Portugal, «a época das cerimónias morreu». Um casal e o irmão do marido viajam até Reguengos de Monsaraz porque o patriarca (o avô) está moribundo. Em Monsaraz vive o resto do clã, que inclui um filho e uma filha, ambos casados, e uma terceira filha, solteira e mongolóide. O velho morre durante as festas da vila, que terminam com a morte do touro. Não há herança, há dívidas. A família foge do país.

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O REGRESSO DOS ICÓNICOS CARTOONS DE JOÃO ABEL MANTA Ao fim de 48 anos, esta é a primeira reedição do álbum Cartoons 1969‑1975, publicado em Dezembro de 1975, o que significa que levou quase tanto tempo a que estes desenhos regressassem ao convívio dos leitores portugueses como o que durou o regime derrubado pela Revolução de Abril de 1974.Mantém‑se a fidelidade do original aos cartoons, desenhos mais ou menos humorísticos de carácter essencialmente político, com possíveis derivações socioculturais, feitos para a imprensa generalista. Mas a nova edição, com alguns ajustes, acrescenta «todos os desenhos relevantes posteriores a essa data e todos os que, por razões que se desconhece (mas sobre as quais se poderá especular), foram omitidos dessa primeira edição», como explica o organizador, Pedro Piedade Marques, além de um aparato de notas explicativas e contextualizadoras.

In this third installment in her pictogram series for TASCHEN, leading graphic designer Yang Liu brings the way we were face to face with the way we are. Hot on the heels of its best-selling predecessors, Today meets Yesterday deploys the same vivid pictogram pairings to explore the transformations, and the challenges, of our ever-evolving world. Liu has made her name with a combination of graphic precision and incisive observation of behavior patterns. In Today meets Yesterday, her eye for tastes and trends takes ambitious scope, juxtaposing past with present to explore fundamental shifts in society. Along the way, we encounter the tussle between competing ideologies, historic and current global dangers, our interaction with the environment, and the wholesale impact of technology on our ways of living, learning, and loving, from online retail to the rise of the “smombie.” With an eye on everything from geopolitics to concentration spans, Liu’s panorama incorporates the details of daily experience as much as the momentous happenings in history. Through Facebook, food waste, collectivism, and much more, Today meets Yesterday casts the familiar situation in a crisp and discerning light, bringing fresh awareness, as well as some ironies, to who we are and where we came from.

Um exame rigoroso que procura extirpar as ambiguidades relativas à definição de design industrial e que – não pretendendo apenas fazer história – amplia o espaço de intervenção que situa o design industrial no campo das realizações estéticas.

Uma extensa e pormenorizada abordagem à obra de design do arquiteto Álvaro Siza Vieira, desde as peças de mobiliário, de cerâmica, de tapeçaria ou de ourivesaria, até às luminárias, ferragens e acessórios para equipamentos, apresentando para cada uma das cerca de 150 peças selecionadas uma detalhada ficha técnica com identificação, descrição, materiais, empresa distribuidora e fotografias, e integrando ainda um conjunto de esquissos originais nunca publicados e uma entrevista exclusiva ao arquiteto.CoediçãoArteBooks DesignCoordenação Científica + EntrevistaJosé Manuel PedreirinhoDesign GráficoJoão Machado, Marta Machado

Design e Risco de Mudança lança-nos interrogações múltiplas que se prendem, desde logo, com o próprio título: qual o risco a que se refere Victor Margolin? O Design, enquanto disciplina charneira entre um número crescente de áreas do saber, pode assumir-se como polo agregador e diversificador, acrescendo e aprofundando as redes de comunicação, gerando sinapses de qualidade. Estas dependem das interrogações e das escolhas que o Design opera. Assim, deveremos interrogar-nos sobre quem faz as escolhas e com que pressupostos são feitas, já que cada caminho é consonante com uma visão do mundo que, segundo a especificidade de cada designer, se manifesta na sua vida e se espelha no trabalho.CoediçãoVerso da HistóriaCoordenação EditorialRosa Alice BrancoPrefácioEduardo Corte-Real