Homage to Will Blythe as Reviewer

 

American literary critic Will Blythe 

I'm reading this novel at the moment, a demanding novel that is, using the vocab of critic Dustin Illingworth, an anti-realist novel.  Dustin goes on to say about this type of novel: "These fictions do not purport to be projections of some sedate, agreed-upon reality. Instead, they suggest the secret dream-life of a culture, harnessing its most intimate fantasies and anxieties."  I love those lines and I'm sinking into literary intoxication as I read Lobo Antunes' 600-pager, a novel that will take me months to finish.  Hey, with writing like this, why not take the needed time to luxuriate in the language, the images, the creamy stream-of-consciousness? Anyway, here is Will Blythe's artful New York Times review:

WHAT CAN I DO WHEN EVERYTHING’S ON FIRE? by António Lobo Antunes --- tanslated by Gregory Rabassa

There are novels out there as vertiginous as the dread K2, steep with degrees of difficulty that put readers into the same position as mountaineers staring at a terrifying traverse. They can only hope that the view from the top will be worth the rigors of the ascent. Other­wise, everyone might as well return to base camp, tuck into their mummy bags and read detective novels by flashlight while sucking on bottles of the finest oxygen.

“What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?,” by the Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes, is such a novel. The author of nearly 20 works of fiction, many not yet available in English, Antunes is said by some readers, including his translator, Gregory Rabassa, to be at least the equal of his countryman, the Nobel laureate José Saramago. Ominous, whirling, repetitive to the point of exhaustion, the newly translated novel centers around the figure of Carlos, a female impersonator who abandons his wife, Judite, and his son, Paulo, who serves as the book’s principal but by no means exclusive point of view.

Son and wife are inconvenient — why not say it: a drag on Carlos’s life in Lisbon’s demimonde, an Iberian melodrama of wigs and camisoles, makeup and falsies, nightclubs and assignations. And also of suicide, murder, alcoholism, drug addiction and disease. If coming upon a father applying mascara and padding his buttocks isn’t confusing enough to an impressionable boy, Paulo must also endure a mother who in her disappointment and poverty drinks heavily and sleeps with local merchants, discharging her debts while sending her son outside to play.

For all of its high modernist stylings, “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” is the soapiest of operas, a frozen bubble bath of hysteria that comes complete with a dramatis personae featuring 16 drag queens in order of appearance. If in American popular culture, drag queens, pitching their sassy quips against the hetero and clueless, have become the embodiment of an oracular, salty and utterly harmless wisdom, these Lisbon divas are portrayed as mocked, downtrodden outsiders compelled to hide their sashay in the closet next to the high heels. The disembodied refrain “faggot”follows them throughout the text.

As a drag queen, Carlos is not well suited to the demands of fatherhood, which tend to get in the way of primping. He asks his son, “Why can’t they let me be a woman like other women?” As a child, Paulo begs his father to play piggyback. “The spangles don’t upset me,” he says. Judite repeatedly addresses her own despairing questions to her husband. “Do you wear this, Carlos?” And “Why Carlos? . . . Why Carlos?”

Wounded and inadequate as parents, Carlos and Judite give Paulo to a couple who’ve lost a child to illness. The old man has disappeared into memories of the Second World War, his wife into fantasies of their late daughter. Together, they make weekly pilgrimages to her grave. Paulo returns their affections by desecrating their prized photograph of the girl. “I’m all you have and I detest you,” he tells them. In time, he also steals, shoots heroin with his father’s boyfriend, Rui, seduces a cafeteria worker during his stay at the asylum and hangs out with the bad crowd inside his head.

He is not a particularly companionable narrator. The world is not much to his taste. Like even the minor characters of this novel, of which there are many, he is trying, at great length and against all odds, to piece together the shards of his grim destiny. His views are acrid, unsparing. He does not miss a trick, as it were. In his mind, he taunts his father. “Do you want your wig, father, your lipstick, your creams, do you want me to put the music on, applaud you, bring you the gold dress and the feather stole for your final glory?”

As a monologuist of fractured rants, Paulo, like a Presbyterian preacher, proceeds to tell readers what he’s about to tell them, then tells them, then tells them what he just told them for about 400 or so more pages. Obsession has its splendors mainly when it’s your own.

And that’s the primary problem with “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” The book is an excellent embodiment of the nature of obsession without being a particularly good dramatization of it. This means that chapter by chapter, not only can you step into the same river twice (the River Tagus here), you can even drown in it an infinite number of times. No one escapes the traumas that compress his or her histories into a single eternal point. You don’t so much observe the characters in action as overhear them muttering to themselves. Were the neighbor­hoods of Lisbon not so pungently presented, a reader would feel trapped, as if within the featureless claustrophobia of a Beckett novel.

The book is a welter of discordant voices, erupting out of the ether of the white page like ghost-murmurs at a séance. Every character is buffeted by them, the voices come from all directions and even mingle with one another a most unholy cacopho­ny. How could fate have been unkind to so many? Whether dead or emotionally distressed, the characters recycle their grievances of lost love and unappeasable hungers. Again and again: “Why Carlos?”

Their heads are filled with the cries of sirens, but there’s no mast to which they can tie themselves, no pilot to sail the ship out of earshot. Consciousness, with its implacable yammering, is apparently infernal torture indeed — other than oblivion, there’s nowhere to go. How do you abandon your own mind?

The narrative keeps circling Lisbon, looking for a place to land. And in a sense, it never does. Development, resolution are forever denied. Characters die, kill themselves and go mad, over and over again. Nautilus, whirlpool, galaxy: this is a novel that spirals around the same events at ever greater speeds. Antunes has written a book in which everything is happening at once. We experience the book’s concentric motion as William Faulkner described time: “There was no yesterday and no tomorrow, it all is this moment.”

Indeed, Faulkner presides over “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?” as a tutelary spirit. Here, for instance, is a legendary sentence, spoken by a death-­befuddled child, from “As I Lay Dying,” published in 1930: “My mother is a fish.”And here, uttered by a baffled son, is a sentence from “What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?”: “You’ve turned into a fish, father.” Like Faulkner in his great novels of the ’30s, Antunes deploys idiot monologues, garrulous, colloquial voices, superheated atmospherics and dismembered narratives that exalt not-knowing as a prime literary excitement.

To Antunes’s credit, he refuses to take for granted the novel as a form. He writes as if it were a fresh invention, as if the many innovations of the last century — stream of consciousness, for one — were his for the taking. At liberty to annotate his own story’s composition, Paulo praises the nib of his pen: “Clearer and clearer, the scribbling as the metal gets rid of a piece of dirt . . . and the piece of dirt is imprisoned in a blue strain, another way of writing, telling a story . . . what story? Mine too maybe mine or the reverse of mine.”

Does Antunes risk what the critic Harold Bloom calls “belatedness,” that sense that what he’s doing has already been done — and quite well — before? Most likely. It is impossible not to read his dense, difficult prose in the light of his illustrious predecessors. But then most things have been done well before, and that’s hardly reason to stop doing them. The hunt for originality as a virtue in its own right often results in anxious palaver. Reading “What Can I Do When Every­thing’s on Fire?” in this jaded epoch is a little like watching your child learn how to ride a bicycle. Of course, you’ve ridden a bike yourself many years before and it shouldn’t feel new, but as you watch your daughter wobble down the street for the first time, you feel again the thrill of her new glide in your old bones.