The Fat Man and Infinity: And Other Writings

I recently saw this title in the new book section of the the library, was intrigued and took it home. I became an instant convert! Billy Collins, former US poet laureate, has said : "His descriptive quickness and his genius for metaphor causes the line between prose and portray to vanish before our astonished eyes." Harold Bloom, literary critic, said: "One of the living writers who will matter the most." Antunes is easily in the company of James Joyce, William Faulkner and Sigmund Freud, all three of whom he has acknowledged as influences, while remaining a great original himself. If you enjoy good poetry and its inherent ambiguity, his writings are bound to astonish you. The present book is a collection of 107 short pieces, 600 to 1000 words, partly a memoir, that is an excellent, very approachable introduction to his many novels. I have now read three of his novels and am finishing a fourth, where his imagination really soars. I write some poetry and found his works really inspiring in my pursuit of my own imagination, stirred up by his. Each of his works is a treasure chest about the human condition. He is a meticulous craftsman -- he reports that three pages a week is about his usual pace for his novels. Many of the 107 pieces have been published previously as newspaper pieces, so reading all 107 pieces at one go might be overwhelming compared to enjoying one a week. The stories have a ordinary coherence that his novels sometimes do not. In his novels he allows himself to tell a story from points of view of many of the minds of his characters, weaving these voices in his original manner. At times it seems the reader is left with little clue as to who is saying what, but after while, with persistence, one can catch on to his method. In my opinion Antunes is much more successful than Joyce was in his Ulysses in communicating to the reader his characters and their rejoicing and suffering in the human condition. I am glad I read The Fat Man & Infinity first. To read his novels the reader has to draw on his own imagination as a raft to ride the seas of ambiguity Antunes provides. Without such a raft, interest will drown. Each reader no doubt has a different trip, different vistas, different thrills. This is also true for Joyce's Ulysses, Ledo Ivo's Intruder and Garcia Marquez's novels, but for me, Antunes' seas are the most worthwhile. Antunes, in his novel What Can I Do When Everything Is on Fire?, makes what seems to be a self reference about his writing: "..., I wrote it with this memory of the feeling I had as a way of seeing that I wouldn't lose it." (p. 233). This is the outlook of the poet. He piles descriptions upon description, interwoven by remarks of one or more minds to create the rich sea of words that one must navigate to absorb the feelings he is communicating. And his novels deal with much tragedy and sorrow and cruelty in the human condition as well as longings, desires and love. He trained and practiced as a psychiatri